Turkish (), also referred to as Istanbul Turkish, is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 1015 million native speakers in Southeast Europe (mostly in East and Western Thrace) and 6065 million native speakers in Western Asia (mostly in Anatolia). Outside of Turkey, significant smaller groups of speakers exist in Germany, Bulgaria, 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 EU language, even though Turkey is not a member state.

To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkishthe variety of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empirespread as the Ottoman Empire expanded. In 1928, as one of Ataturk'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 subjectobjectverb. Turkish has no noun classes or grammatical gender. The language has a strong TV distinction and usage of honorifics. Turkish uses second-person pronouns that distinguish varying levels of politeness, social distance, age, courtesy or familiarity toward the addressee. The plural second-person pronoun and verb forms are used referring to a single person out of respect.

1. what language is the article about?
2. is it called something else?
3. what?
4. what countries do most people who speak it in South Eastern Europe live?
5. how many of them are there?
6. is it used in places other than Europe?
7. what makes it distinct?
8. in what order are words used?
9. what happened in 1928?
10. who did that?
1. Turkish
2. yes
3. Istanbul Turkish
4. East and Western Thrace
5. 1015 million
6. yes
7. vowel harmony and extensive agglutination
8. subjectobjectverb.
9. Ottoman Turkish alphabet was replaced with a Latin alphabet.
10. Ottoman Empire