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Turkish Language Profile Tűrkçe |
| Turkish is spoken by approximately 60 million people, most of whom
reside in Turkey. Large communities of Turkish speakers can also be
found in northern Europe, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece, and Macedonia. Turkish is the most widely spoken language of the Altaic family, a non-Indo-European language group which includes Mongolian, the Turkic languages of central Asia and possibly Korean and Japanese. In the early stages of its development Turkish was heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian. After the conversion of the Turks to Islam in the tenth century, the Arabic alphabet was adapted for writing Turkish and a stream of Arabic words entered the Turkish language. A similar linguistic invasion occurred 200 years later with Persian, whose literary genres and styles were widely imitated by Turkish writers. The result was a kind of hybrid language, with a vast number of Semitic and Indo-European words imposed on the basic Turkish stock. Between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ottoman Turkish, or Osmanli, as it was called, was used primarily for administrative and literary purposes; it never achieved the status of a national colloquial language. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Turkey underwent a period of extensive and radical reform - religious, political, social and linguistic. In an attempt to purge the language of foreign elements, Turkish linguists sought Turkish substitutes for the thousands of Arabic and Persian words in the language. The Arabic script, poorly suited to the sounds of Turkish in any case, was replaced with a modified version of the Latin alphabet. Over the course of several decades, these measures led to what is now known as modern standard Turkish. 
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