Turkish

### Recognised minority language in

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, Iraq, Kosovo, (Former Yugoslavic Republic of) Macedonia, Romania

## Overview

**Turkish** (*Türkçe*) also referred to as **Istanbul Turkish**, is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 10–15 million native speakers in Southeast Europe (mostly in East and Western Thrace) and 60–65 million native speakers in Western Asia (mostly in Anatolia). Outside 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 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. The language has a strong T–V 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.

## History

### Ottoman Turkish

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.

### Reformation and Modern Language

After the foundation of the modern state of Turkey and the script reform, the Turkish Language Association (TDK) was established in 1932 under the patronage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, with the aim of conducting research on Turkish. One of the tasks of the newly established association was to initiate a language reform to replace loanwords of Arabic and Persian origin with Turkish equivalents. By banning the usage of imported words in the press, the association succeeded in removing several hundred foreign words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by the TDK were newly derived from Turkic roots, it also opted for reviving Old Turkish words which had not been used for centuries.

Owing to this sudden change in the language, older and younger people in Turkey started to differ in their vocabularies. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the older terms of Arabic or Persian origin, the younger generations favor new expressions. It is considered particularly ironic that Atatürk himself, in his lengthy speech to the new Parliament in 1927, used a style of Ottoman which sounded so alien to later listeners that it had to be "translated" three times into modern Turkish: first in 1963, again in 1986, and most recently in 1995.

The past few decades have seen the continuing work of the TDK to coin new Turkish words to express new concepts and technologies as they enter the language, mostly from English. Many of these new words, particularly information technology terms, have received widespread acceptance. However, the TDK is occasionally criticized for coining words which sound contrived and artificial. Some earlier changes—such as '**bölem'** to replace '**fırka'**, "political party"—also failed to meet with popular approval ('**fırka'** has been replaced by the French loanword '**parti'**). Some words restored from Old Turkic have taken on specialized meanings; for example '**betik'** (originally meaning "book") is now used to mean "script" in computer science.

Many of the words derived by TDK coexist with their older counterparts. This usually happens when a loanword changes its original meaning. For instance, '**dert'**, derived from the Persian '**dard'** (درد "pain"), means "problem" or "trouble" in Turkish; whereas the native Turkish word '**ağrı'** is used for physical pain. Sometimes the loanword has a slightly different meaning from the native Turkish word, creating a situation similar to the coexistence of Germanic and Romance words in English.

## Turkish excerpt from Wikipedia article "Türkçe"

Türkçe, Türkiye'nin ve Türkiye Türklerinin kurumsal dilidir. Türkiye'de Türk Dil Kurumu, *Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti* adıyla 12 Temmuz 1932'de Atatürk'ün talimatıyla kurulmuştur. Cemiyetin kurucuları, hepsi de milletvekili ve dönemin tanınmış edebiyatçıları olan Sâmih Rifat, Ruşen Eşref, Celâl Sahir ve Yakup Kadri'dir. Kurumun ilk başkanı Sâmih Rifat'tır. Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyetinin amacı, "Türk dilinin öz güzelliğini ve zenginliğini meydana çıkarmak, onu yeryüzü dilleri arasında değerine yaraşır yüksekliğe eriştirmek" olarak tespit edilmiştir. Atatürk'ün sağlığında, 1932, 1934 ve 1936 yıllarında yapılan üç kurultayda hem Kurumun yönetim organları seçilmiş, hem dil politikası belirlenmiş, hem de bilimsel bildiriler sunulup tartışılmıştır. 26 Eylül-5 Ekim 1932 tarihleri arasında Dolmabahçe Sarayı'nda yapılan Birinci Türk Dili Kurultayı sonunda Kurumun "Lügat-Istılah, Gramer-Sentaks, Derleme, Lenguistik-Filoloji, Etimoloji, Yayın" adları ile altı kol hâlinde çalışmalarını sürdürmesi kabul edilmiştir. Sonraki kurultaylarda bu kollardan bazıları ayrılmış, bazıları tekrar birleştirilmiş; fakat ana çatı değiştirilmemiştir. 1934'te yapılan kurultayda Cemiyetin adı, Türk Dili Araştırma Kurumu; 1936'daki kurultayda ise Türk Dil Kurumu olmuştur.

Türk Dil Kurumu, Türkiye Türkçesinin imlasının standartlarını belirleme, dil hakkında çeşitli düzeyde çalışmalar yapma gibi konularda faaliyetler yürütür. Günümüzde bu kurum, sadece Türkiye değil, dünya çapında Türkçe ve Türkoloji ile ilgili çeşitli çalışmalarda kurumsal yüzü veya akademik mensuplarıyla yer almaktadır.

Türk Dil Kurumunun yapısıyla ilgili ilk önemli değişiklik 1951 yılındaki olağanüstü kurultayda yapılmıştır. Atatürk'ün sağlığında Millî Eğitim Bakanının Kurum başkanı olmasını sağlayan tüzük maddesi 1951'de değiştirilmiş; böylece Kurumun devletle bağlantısı koparılmıştır. İkinci önemli yapı değişikliği 1982-1983 yıllarında gerçekleştirilmiştir. 1982'de kabul edilen ve şu anda da yürürlükte olan Anayasa ile Türk Dil Kurumu ve Türk Tarih Kurumu, bir Anayasa kuruluşu olan Atatürk Kültür, Dil ve Tarih Yüksek Kurumu çatısı altına alınmış; böylece devletle olan bağlar yeniden ve daha güçlü olarak kurulmuştur.