Turkish

Where it’s spoken

Turkish is the official language of Turkey and one of two official languages of Cyprus. Major Turkish-speaking communities live in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Austria, and the United Kingdom — descendants of post-war guest workers. Closely related Turkish varieties are spoken in the Balkans (Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece).

What it sounds like

Turkish has eight vowels organized in a strict harmony system: front/back, rounded/unrounded, high/low. Suffixes shift their vowels to harmonize with the root, so the plural is -ler after front vowels and -lar after back vowels. Stress typically falls on the final syllable. Consonants are clean and consistent — Turkish lacks “th,” “w,” and other sounds common in Indo-European languages.

How it’s written

Modern Turkish has used the Latin alphabet since Atatürk’s 1928 reform, replacing the Ottoman Perso-Arabic script. The alphabet has 29 letters, including distinctively Turkish ç, ğ, ı (dotless i), İ, ö, ş, and ü. Spelling is almost perfectly phonemic.

History

The Ottoman Empire used a heavily Persianized, Arabic-script literary Turkish until the language reform movement (1932–) purged Persian and Arabic vocabulary in favor of revived or coined Turkic roots.