Turkish (Türkçe [ˈtyɾctʃɛ], Türk dili [ˈtyɾc dilɪ], also known as Türkiye Türkçesi 'Turkish of Turkey') is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and one of two official languages of Cyprus. Significant smaller groups of Turkish speakers also exist in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece, other parts of Europe, the South Caucasus, and some parts of Central Asia, Iraq, and Syria. Turkish is the 18th-most spoken language in the world. To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkish—the variety of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire—spread as the Ottoman Empire expanded. In 1928, as one of Atatürk's reforms in the early years of the Republic of Turkey, the Perso-Arabic script-based Ottoman Turkish alphabet was replaced with the Latin script-based Turkish alphabet. Turkish grammar is characterized by extensive agglutination and is generally very regular. The basic word order is subject–object–verb. Turkish has no noun classes or grammatical gender. Other notable grammatical features include evidentiality, converbs, and a variety of tenses, aspects, and moods. Turkish phonology is marked by vowel harmony; native words typically contain only front (⟨e, i, ö, ü⟩) or back (⟨a, ı, o, u⟩) vowels, a phenomenon known as palatal harmony. In addition, certain suffixes exhibit a fourfold harmony that also includes rounding harmony among high vowels. While most suffixes agree with vowel harmony, there are some exceptions. Loanwords are not required to follow this rule. Turkish has a word accent system that has been described as either stress- or pitch-based. Most native words are accented on the last syllable, though this can vary due to suffixes. Meanwhile, loanwords vary considerably in this regard. Over 80% of Turkish vocabulary stems from native Turkic, with significant contributions from Ottoman-era Arabic, French, and Persian loanwords, as well as smaller contributions from Italian, Greek, and English. Many loanwords, especially those from Arabic, were replaced by Turkish coinages during the Turkish language reform due to prevailing ideas of linguistic purism. The language makes usage of honorifics and has a strong T–V distinction which distinguishes varying levels of politeness, social distance, age, courtesy or familiarity toward the addressee. The plural second-person pronoun and verb forms can be used for referring to a single person out of respect.
Classification
Turkish is a member of the Oghuz group of the Turkic family. Other members include Azerbaijani, spoken in Azerbaijan and north-west Iran, Gagauz of Gagauzia, Qashqai of south Iran, and Turkmen of Turkmenistan. Historically, the Turkic language family was considered part of the larger Altaic language family, along with the Japanese, Korean, Mongolic, and Tungusic language families. Some linguists have also proposed including other language families. Altaic theory has fallen out of favour since the 1960s, and a majority of linguists now consider Turkic languages to be unrelated to any other language family, though the Altaic hypothesis still has a small degree of support from individual linguists. The nineteenth-century Ural-Altaic theory, which grouped Turkish with Finnish, Hungarian and Altaic languages, is considered even less plausible in light of Altaic's rejection. The theory was based mostly on the fact these languages share three features: agglutination, vowel harmony and lack of grammatical gender.
History
The earliest known Old Turkic inscriptions are the three monumental Orkhon inscriptions found in modern Mongolia. Erected in honour of the prince Kul Tigin and his brother Emperor Bilge Khagan, these date back to the Second Turkic Khaganate (dated 682–744 CE). After the discovery and excavation of these monuments and associated stone slabs by Russian archaeologists in the wider area surrounding the Orkhon Valley between 1889 and 1893, it became established that the language on the inscriptions was the Old Turkic language written using the Old Turkic alphabet, which has also been referred to as "Turkic runes" or "runiform" due to a superficial similarity to the Germanic runic alphabets. With the Turkic expansion during Early Middle Ages (c. 6th–11th centuries), peoples speaking Turkic languages spread across Central Asia, covering a vast geographical region stretching from Siberia all the way to Europe and the Mediterranean. The Seljuqs of the Oghuz Turks, in particular, brought their language, Oghuz—the direct ancestor of today's Turkish language—into Anatolia during the 11th century. Also during the 11th century, an early linguist of the Turkic languages, Mahmud al-Kashgari from the Kara-Khanid Khanate, published the first comprehensive Turkic language dictionary and map of the geographical distribution of Turkic speakers in the Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk (ديوان لغات الترك).
Ottoman Turkish
Following the adoption of Islam around the year 950 by the Kara-Khanid Khanate and the Seljuq Turks, who are both regarded as the ethnic and cultural ancestors of the Ottomans, the administrative language of these states acquired a large collection of loanwords from Arabic and Persian. Turkish literature during the Ottoman period, particularly Divan poetry, was heavily influenced by Persian, including the adoption of Persian poetic meters and a great quantity of imported Persian words. The literary and official language during the Ottoman Empire period (c. 1299–1922) is termed Ottoman Turkish, which borrowed heavily from Persian and Arabic that differed considerably from today's modern Turkish, was largely unintelligible to the period's everyday Turkish. The everyday Turkish, known as kaba Türkçe or 'vulgar Turkish', spoken by the less-educated, lower and also rural members of Ottoman society, contained a higher percentage of native vocabulary and served as the basis for the modern Turkish language. While visiting the region between Adıyaman and Adana, Evliya Çelebi recorded the "Turkman language" and compared it with his own Turkish:
Language reform and modern Turkish
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