Philological information on "Turkish" was prepared by the translation studies division of Dijital Tercüme.
 
Turkish, or in other words Turkey Turkish, is the official language of Turkey, Azerbaijan and Northern Cyprus. Regionally, it is also among the official languages in Kosovo, Macedonia, Romania and Iraq. It is spoken by 85 million people in the world and it is the native language of 65 million people. It is spoken in Bulgaria, Iraq, Iran, Northern Cyprus, Kosovo, Lebanon, Hungary, Macedonia, Romania, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Greece, the USA, Germany, Australia, Belgium, United Kingdom, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, Lichtenstein, Norway, regions where Meskhetian Turks live (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan etc.) and Saudi Arabia.
 
It belongs to the Altaic Language Family of the Ural-Altaic languages, along with Mongolian, Manchu-Tungusic, Korean, according to some philologists Japanese, and other Turkic languages. It belongs to the Oghuz subgroup. In Turkish, the Latin alphabet is used and it is the 15th most spoken language in the world. The current structure of Turkish and changes in the language are monitored and regulated by the Turkish Language Association, which was an independent institution until 1983, and is now acting under state control. Turkish has many different dialects and accents due to the wide geography it is spoken in.The "Istanbul Dialect" is the official written language. The accent differences are common between the Rumelia Region, Black Sea Region, Southeast and Aegean Region. Outside of Turkey it has different dialects based on the region it is used in, such as Azeri Turkish, Turkmen Turkish, Gagauz dialects, Horasan dialect in Iran, Cyprus dialect etc.
 
Looking at the features of Turkish, we can observe that, it is an agglutinative language like other Altaic languages; words are derived via suffixes; there is no masculinity-femininity (no gender divide) in Turkish words; it is possible to derive many new words from a simple stem or by combining two different words; there can be sentences with just one word; there are two types of vowel harmonies, palatal harmony and flatness harmony; it is a rich language in terms of idioms and proverbs; it has 8 vowels and 21 consonants; nouns following numerical adjectives do not take plurality suffixes in Turkish and there are front-back and round-flat harmonies.
 
Looking at the development of Turkish, we can see that first the Göktürk alphabet was used. The Turkish used in this period is pure Turkish and when read today it has quite understandable words and structure. Afterwards, even though there was a transition to the Uyghur alphabet, in terms of phonetics and vocabulary, the language did not stray away from pure Turkish. After the 9th century, the language started to use the Arabic alphabet and came under heavy influence of Persian and Arabic. In the 13th century, the language that emerged using this Arabic alphabet, became a common communications tool among Turkic tribes. Starting from the 14th century, this version of Turkish, through regulations and additions under the name Ottoman was dominated by Arabic and Persian and it became an elaborate and embellished language as it moved away from its pure form spoken by the public. After the 18th century, the strong influence of French on the language was felt. In the first 9 years after the founding of the Republic and two alphabet reforms, the Latin alphabet began to be used and massive simplifications to the language were made.
 
Turks have lived in various places in the world, and due to their intermingling with various cultures, there are many "borrowed words" in the language. This led to a very rich vocabulary in the language. There are 650,000 entries of proverbs, idioms, terms and nouns in the Grand Turkish Dictionary. Around 14% of these are words that have entered Turkish from foreign languages, and the number of words in other languages from Turkish cannot be underestimated as well. Statistically, words in different languages that were derived from Turkish are as follows: 8995 words from Turkish in Serbian, 3490 in Bulgarian, 2984 in Greek, 2969 in Persian, 2622 in Albanian, 2780 in Romanian, 2476 in Russian,1990 in Arabic, 1982 in Hungarian, 800 in Ukrainian, 470 in English, 289 in Chinese, 248 in Czech, 227 in Urdu, 166 in German,146 in Italian, and 115 in Finnish.
 
It is possible to get undergraduate level education in our country from Turkish Language and Literature departments in order to learn about the historical development of Turkish, its connection to other languages, and the history of Turkish literature and its contemporary condition. The graduates of Turkish Language and Literature are given the title Turkologist, and can work at libraries, archives, the Ministry of Culture and the TRT with this title. They can work as editors, teachers or as instructors in higher education institutions. There are about 50 Turkish Language and Literature departments in our country. Boğaziçi University, Hacettepe University, Istanbul University, Ankara University are some of the universities which have a Turkish Language and Literature department.