Turkish

Turkish (Turkish: *Türkçe*) is the most widely spoken member of Turkic language family. The distinctive characteristics of the Turkish language are vowel harmony and extensive agglutination. It has 88 million estimated speakers in the world. It is a recognized minority language in Bosnia, Croatia, Greece, Iraq, Romania, Kosovo, and Syria, and more, especially in places where the former Ottoman Empire ruled. Turkish is the 16th most commonly spoken language] in the world as a first language and on. The Azerbaijani language is a similar language, described by some to be mutually intelligeble, leading some to think it is just a dialect, but the difference in the languages are great enough to consider them separate.

## Turkish

### Spoken in

Turkey, Bosnia, Croatia, Greece, Iraq, Romania, Kosovo, Syria, Aegean Islands, Cyprus, Middle East, North Macedonia

### Contributors

u/Average-MKA-Enjoyer, u/EmperorMenemen, u/Xeadriel, Saava

## Phonology

### Phonotactics

#### Vowel Harmony

The vowel harmony of Turkish, like that of other languages, is intended to minimize the effort required to speak. It follows these three rules:

* If the first vowel in a word is back, all of the following vowels are back. Same with front
* If the first vowel is unrounded, so are the following
* If the first vowel is rounded, the following vowels should be close-rounded or open-unrounded

Grammatical affixes also follow vowel harmony, but they don’t follow the same rules. Some follow a 'twofold' pattern, where they switch between *e/a* depending on the backness of the first vowel, and 'fourfold', where they switch bewteen *i/ɯ/y/u* depending on backness and rounding. To indicate whether a grammatical feature follows either pattern, superscripts *2* and *4* are frquently used.

In short:

Certain words do not follow vowel harmony. They fall in one of these 4 categories:

* Native non-compound words
* Native compound words
* Loanwords
* Invariable suffixes

How a word can be neither native nor loan, I don’t know, so I will have to find more information on this.

## Grammar

### Nouns

#### Affixes

Turkish uses a lot of affixes, which are used to modify nouns to become verbs, vice versa, and especially grammatical function. This can lead to extremely long words, such as, *Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına*, which means "In the manner of you being one of those that we apparently couldn't manage to convert to Czechoslovakian" (taken from Wikipedia). While this example is not one you you would ever encounter (probably), there are other words which you may find more frequently, such as *Bayramlaşamadıklarımız*, meaning "Those of our number with whom we cannot exchange the season's greetings", which is a heading for a newspaper obituary (also taken from Wikipedia).

#### Gender

Although Turkish lacks gender, there are methods that you can use to distinguish between sex. Most domestic animals have words for both male and female forms, and for the others the word *dişi* can be placed in front of the nouns. To specify that a person is female, the words *kız* (girl) or *kadın* (woman) can be used. Some loanwords from French and Arabic already have female forms, and sometimes the Serbo-Croat suffix *-ica* (which changed to *-ıça*) can be used to determine femininity.

#### Case

While there is no definite article, definiteness can be implied by the the accusative. Turkish has six noun cases, all of which follow vowel harmony. The postposition *ile* is some times taken to be an instrumental case, while it uses the genitive case for personal pronouns, singular demonstratives (that, this), and the word *kim*. The plural marker *-ler* is added before the case markers.

### Syntax

#### Word Order

Turkish tends to follow Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) order, similar to German and Japanese (this is known as "kurallı cümle"), but other forms can be used, just with less frequency (these are called "devrik cümle").

## Other Articles

Turkish Romanization

Turkish Bird Language