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Information AboutTurkish Language |
Turkish ('''', ) is a language spoken by 65–73 million people worldwide, predominantly in Turkey , with smaller communities of speakers in Cyprus , Greece and Eastern Europe , as well as by several million Immigrant s in Western Europe , particularly Germany , making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic Languages . The roots of the language can be traced to Central Asia , with the first written records dating back nearly 1,200 years. To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkish —the immediate precursor of today's Turkish—spread as the Ottoman Empire expanded. In 1928, as one of Atatürk's Reforms in the early years of the new Turkish Republic , the Ottoman Script was replaced with a phonetic variant of the Latin Alphabet . Concurrently, the newly founded Turkish Language Association initiated a drive to reform the language by removing Persian and Arabic loanwords in favor of native variants and coinages from Turkic roots. The distinctive characteristics of Turkish are es or Grammatical Gender . CLASSIFICATION See Also: Turkic languages Altaic languages Turkish is a member of the Turkish, or Western, subgroup of the Oghuz Languages , which includes Gagauz and Azeri . The Oghuz languages form the Southwestern subgroup of the Turkic Languages , a language family comprising some thirty living languages spoken across Eastern Europe , Central Asia and Siberia , which some linguists believe to be a part of a larger Altaic Language Family .1 About 40% of Turkic language speakers are Turkish speakers.Katzner The characteristic features of Turkish, such as Vowel Harmony , Agglutination , and lack of Grammatical Gender , are universal within the Turkic family and the Altaic languages. There is a high degree of Mutual Intelligibility between Turkish and the other Oghuz languages, including Azeri , Turkmen , Qashqai , and Gagauz .2 HISTORY See Also: Turkic peoples History of the Turkic peoples inscription with the Orkhon Script (c. 8th century). Kyzyl , Russia ]] The earliest known Turkic inscriptions reside in modern Mongolia , like the Bugut inscriptions written in the Sogdian Alphabet during the First Göktürk Khanate , which are dated to the second half of the 6th Century .34 The two monumental Orkhon Inscriptions , erected in honour of the prince Kul Tigin and his brother Emperor Bilge Khan and dating back to some time between 732 and 735, constitute another important early record. After the discovery and excavation of these monuments and associated stone slabs by Russian archaeologists in the wider area surrounding the Orkhon Valley between 1889–93, it became established that the language on the inscriptions was the Old Turkic Language written using the Orkhon Script , which has also been referred to as "Turkic runes" or "runiform" due to an external similarity to the Germanic Runic Alphabet s.Ishjatms With the Turkic Expansion during Early Middle Ages (c. 6th – 11th Centuries ), peoples speaking Turkic languages spread across Central Asia , covering a vast geographical region stretching from Siberia to Europe and the Mediterranean . The Seljuqs of the Oghuz Turks , in particular, brought their language, Oghuz Turkic , the direct ancestor of today's Turkish language, into Anatolia during the 11th Century .Findley Also during the 11th Century , an early Linguist of the Turkic languages, Kaşgarlı Mahmud from the Kara-Khanid Khanate , published the first comprehensive dictionary of Turkic languages, the ''Compendium of the Turkic Dialects'' (Ottoman Turkish: ''Divânü Lügati't-Türk''), which also included the first known map of the geographical distribution of Turkic speakers.Soucek Ottoman Turkish See Also: Ottoman Turkish language Following the adoption of Islam c. 950 by the Kara-Khanid Khanate and the Seljuq Turks , regarded as the cultural ancestors of the Ottomans , the administrative language of these states acquired a rather large collection of loanwords from Arabic and Persian . Turkish Literature during the Ottoman period, in particular Ottoman Divan Poetry , was heavily influenced by Persian, including the adoption of poetic meters and a great quantity of borrowings. During the course of over six hundred years of the Ottoman Empire (c. 1299–1922), the literary and official language of the empire was a mixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic, which differed considerably from everyday spoken Turkish of the time, and is termed Ottoman Turkish . Language reform and modern Turkish | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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