page_title: Turkish language
section_title: Ottoman Turkish
hierarchical_section_title: Turkish language / History / Ottoman Turkish
caption_attribution_description: Kitab-i Dede Korkut; Nationalepos der Oghusen im Buchmuseum in Dresden; Oghusisch-türkische Handschrift auf Papier aus dem 16. Jahrhundert
context_page_description: Turkish, also referred to as Istanbul Turkish or Turkey Turkish, is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 70 to 80 million speakers, mostly in Turkey. Outside its native country, significant smaller groups of speakers exist in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Northern Cyprus, Greece, the Caucasus, and other parts of Europe and Central Asia. Cyprus has requested that the European Union add Turkish as an official language, even though Turkey is not a member state.
  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 Ottoman Turkish alphabet was replaced with a Latin alphabet.
  The distinctive characteristics of the Turkish language are vowel harmony and extensive agglutination. The basic word order of Turkish is subject–object–verb. Turkish has no noun classes or grammatical gender.
context_section_description: Following the adoption of Islam c. 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 poetic meters and a great quantity of imported words. The literary and official language during the Ottoman Empire period (c. 1299–1922) is termed Ottoman Turkish, which was a mixture of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic that differed considerably and was largely unintelligible to the period's everyday Turkish. The everyday Turkish, known as kaba Türkçe or "rough Turkish", spoken by the less-educated lower and also rural members of society, contained a higher percentage of native vocabulary and served as basis for the modern Turkish language.
caption: The 15th century Book of Dede Korkut
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