Turkish language

Turkish (Türkçe) is a language that is officially spoken in Turkey and Cyprus. Turkish is the 18th most-spoken language in the world.

Turkish is a Turkic language. Turkish is most closely related to other Turkic languages, including Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Kazakh. Another theory is that it is one of the many Altaic languages, which also include Japanese, Mongolian, and Korean.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk changed the script to the Latin alphabet from the Arabic alphabet. The Turkish government justified the language reform as making Turkish much easier to learn, which would increase literacy. The literacy rate indeed increased greatly after the reform from around 10.5% in 1927"Cumhuriyetten sonra kadınların okur yazarlık oranı nedir?" to over 90% today. Some say that the move was also to distance the country from the Ottoman Empire, whose documents can no longer be read except by a few scholars.

The Latin alphabet was made to reflect the actual sounds of spoken Turkish, rather than simply transcribing the old Ottoman Arabic alphabet into a new form. The Turkish alphabet has 29 letters, seven of which (Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş, and Ü) have been modified with diacritics for the phonetic requirements of the language. It represents the 20th-century Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy and specificity. It is the current official alphabet and the latest in a series of distinct alphabets used in different eras.

 Sample phrases 
Merhaba = Hello (formal)
Selam = Hello
Nasılsın? = How are you?
Nasılsınız? = How are you? (formal)
İyiyim = I'm fine
Teşekkür ederim = Thank you (formal)
Teşekkürler = Thanks
Sağ ol = Thank you
Benim adım = My name is
Türkçe bilmiyorum. = I don't speak Turkish.
İngilizce biliyor musun? = Do you speak English? (informal)
İngilizce biliyor musunuz? = Do you speak English? (formal)
Tekrarlar mısınız? = Can you repeat?
Evet = Yes
Hayır = No
Belki = Maybe
Biraz = A little
Acıktım. = I'm hungry.
Dur! = Stop!
Yapma! = Don't do it!
İstemiyorum. = I don't want it.
Tabii = Sure
Bekledim. = I waited.
Bana yardım et! = Help me!
Iyi geceler! = Good night!

 References 


Category:Turkic languages