Languages of Turkey
The languages of Turkey, apart from the official language Turkish, include the widespread Kurdish (Kurmanji), the moderately prevalent minority languages Arabic and Zazaki, and a number of less common minority languages, some of which are guaranteed by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Constitutional rights. Official language. Article 3 of the Constitution of Turkey defines Turkish as the official language of Turkey. Minority language rights. Article 42 of the Constitution explicitly prohibits educational institutions to teach any language other than Turkish as a mother tongue to Turkish citizens. Due to Article 42 and its longtime restrictive interpretation, ethnic  minorities have been facing severe restrictions in the use of their mother languages. Concerning the incompatibility of this provision with the International Bill of Human Rights, Turkey signed the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights only with reservations constraining minority rights and the right to education. Furthermore, Turkey hasn't signed either of the Council of Europe's Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, or the anti-discrimination Protocol 12 to the European Convention on Human Rights. This particular constitutional provision has  been contested both internationally and within Turkey. The provision has been criticized by minority groups, notably the Kurdish community. In October 2004, the Turkish State's Human Rights Advisory Board called for a constitutional review in order to bring Turkey's policy on minorities in line with international standards, but was effectively muted. It was also criticized by EU member states, the OSCE, and international human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch who observe that "the Turkish government accepts the language rights of the Jewish, Greek and Armenian minorities as being guaranteed by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. But the  government claims that these are Turkey's only minorities, and that any talk of minority rights beyond this is just separatism". Supplementary language education. In 2012, the Ministry of Education included Kurdish (based on both Kurmanji and Zazaki dialects) to the academic programme of the basic schools as optional classes from the fifth year on. Later, the Ministry of Education also included Abkhaz, Adyghe, Standard Georgian, and Laz languages in 2013, and Albanian as well as Bosnian languages in February 2017. In 2015, the Turkey’s Ministry of Education announced that as of the 2016-17 academic year, Arabic courses  (as a second language) will be offered to students in elementary school starting in second grade. The Arabic courses will be offered as an elective language course like German, French and English. According to a prepared curriculum, second and third graders will start learning Arabic by listening-comprehension and speaking, while introduction to writing will join these skills in fourth grade and after fifth grade students will start learning the language in all its four basic skills. Lists of languages. The following table lists the mother tongues of people in Turkey by percentage of their speakers. "Ethnologue" lists many minority  and immigrant languages in Turkey some of which are spoken by large numbers of people. Not included in the report by "Ethnologue" is the Megleno-Romanian language, spoken by the Megleno-Romanians, who number around 5,000 in the country. History. Turkey has historically been the home to many now extinct languages. These include Hittite, the earliest Indo-European language for which written evidence exists (circa 1600 BCE to 1100 BCE when the Hittite Empire existed). The other Anatolian languages included Luwian and later Lycian, Lydian and Milyan. All these languages are believed to have become extinct at the latest around  the 1st century BCE due to the Hellenization of Anatolia which led to Greek in a variety of dialects becoming the common language. Urartian belonging to the Hurro-Urartian language family existed in eastern Anatolia around Lake Van. It existed as the language of the kingdom of Urartu from about the 9th century BCE until the 6th century. Hattian is attested in Hittite ritual texts but is not related to the Hittite language or to any other known language; it dates from the 2nd millennium BCE. In the post-Tanzimat period French became a common language among educated people, even  though no ethnic group in the empire natively spoke French. Johann Strauss, author of "Language and power in the late Ottoman Empire," wrote that "In a way reminiscent of English in the contemporary world, French was almost omnipresent in the Ottoman lands." Strauss also stated that French was "a sort of semi-official language", which "to some extent" had "replaced Turkish as an 'official' language for non-Muslims". Therefore late empire had multiple French-language publications, and several continued to operate when the Republic of Turkey was declared in 1923. However French-language publications began to close in the 1930s