All About Turkey

Turkish is the mother tongue of 90 percent of the population.  Our language represents the southwestern arm of the community of Turkic languages within the Ural-Altay linguistic family that slowly evolved over time. Groups speaking these languages spread to the east and northeast out of Central Asia, and particularly to the west. Ever since the very earliest times, Turkish has influenced various dialects of Middle Persian, and turned the Caucasus and Anatolia away from the Indo-European group of languages.

 

Ever since the 8th century, the Turks have employed a number of alphabets, although mainly the Göktürk, Uyghur, Arabic and Latin ones. After the foundation of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk brought about the acceptance of Latin letters in 1928.

 

Prf. Dr. Oktay Sinanoğlu, who is known to have become the youngest person in the world  to attain status as a full professor, says the following words about Turkish language: “Atatürk’s new Turkish writing system is a system, which is longed for all over the world, as it is fully compliant with the language it belongs to; words are  written as they sound, and you read them as they appear. Anybody can learn this writing system in a couple of weeks. There is not such a problem that you are not sure about how to read or write an unknown word in Turkish.”

Turkish Language