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Turkish
Türkçe
Pronunciation
Native to	Turkey, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Romania, Azerbaijan, and by immigrant communities in Germany, France, The Netherlands, Austria, Uzbekistan, United States, Belgium, Switzerland, and other countries of the Turkish diaspora
Region	Turkey, Cyprus, Balkans, Caucasus
Native speakers	65–73 million native
Language family	Altaic (controversial) Turkic Southwestern Turkic (Oghuz) Western Oghuz Turkish
Writing system	Latin alphabet (Turkish variant)
Official status
Official language in	Turkey, Cyprus, Northern Cyprus, Kosovo, Republic of Macedonia In municipalities with more than 20% Turkish speakers.
Regulated by	Turkish Language Association
Language codes
ISO 639-1	tr
ISO 639-2	tur
ISO 639-3	tur
Countries with significant Turkish-speaking populations (Click on image for the legend)

Turkish (Türkçe, ) 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 immigrants 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 vowel harmony and extensive agglutination. The basic word order of Turkish is Subject Object Verb. Turkish has a T-V distinction: second-person plural forms can be used for individuals as a sign of respect. Turkish also has no noun classes or grammatical gender.

Classification

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. About 40% of Turkic language speakers are Turkish speakers. 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.

History

The first records of the Turkic languages date back to some time between 732 and 735, when two monumental inscriptions were erected in the Orkhon Valley in honour of the Göktürk prince Kul Tigin and his brother Emperor Bilge Khan. After the discovery and excavation of the monuments and associated stone slabs in the wider area by Russian archaeologists 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 alphabets. 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.. 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.

Ottoman Turkish

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

The literacy rates rose to 48.4% among males and 20.7% among females in 1950. After the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, and following the script reform, the Turkish Language Association (TDK) was established under the patronage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1932, with the aim of conducting research on Turkish. One of the tasks of the newly established association was to initiate a language reform to replace loanwords of Arabic and Persian origin with Turkish equivalents. By banning the usage of replaced loanwords in the press, the association succeeded in removing several hundred foreign words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by the TDK were newly derived from Turkic roots, it also opted for reviving Old Turkish words which had not been used for centuries.

Due to this sudden change in the language, older and younger people in Turkey started to differ in vocabularies they used. While the generations born before the 1940s tend to use the older terms of Arabic or Persian origin, the younger generations favor new expressions. It is particularly ironic that Atatürk himself, in his monumental speech to the new Parliament in 1927, used a style of Ottoman diction which today sounds so alien that it has had to be "translated" twice into modern Turkish: first in 1963, then again in 1986. There is also a political dimension to the language debate, with conservative groups tending to use more archaic words in the press or everyday language.

The past few decades have seen the continuing work of the TDK to coin new Turkish words to express new concepts and technologies as they enter the language, mostly from English. Many of these new words, particularly information technology terms, have received widespread acceptance, but the TDK is occasionally criticized for coining words which sound contrived and artificial. Some earlier coinages, too, such as bölem (to replace fırka, "political party"), failed to meet with popular approval. In fact fırka has been replaced by the French loanword parti. Some words restored from Old Turkic have taken on specialized meanings: for example betik (originally meaning "book") is now used to mean script in computer science.

Many of the words derived by TDK coexist with their older counterparts. This usually happens when a loanword changes its original meaning. For instance dert, derived from the Persian word dard (درد "pain"), is used in Turkish to mean "problem" or "trouble"; whereas the native Turkish word ağrı is used for physical pain. Sometimes the loanword has a slightly different meaning from the native Turkish word, giving rise to a situation similar to the coexistence of Germanic and Romance words in English (see List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents). Among some of the old words that were replaced are terms in geometry, cardinal directions, some months' names and many nouns and adjectives. Some examples of modern Turkish words and the old loanwords are:

Geographic distribution

Turkish is natively spoken by the Turkish people in Turkey and by the Turkish diaspora in some 30 other countries. In particular, Turkish speaking minorities exist in countries that formerly (in whole or part) belonged to the Ottoman Empire, such as Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece (primarily in Western Thrace), the Republic of Macedonia, Romania, and Serbia. More than two million Turkish speakers live in Germany, and there are significant Turkish speaking communities in France, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. But due to the cultural assimilation of Turkish immigrants in host countries, not all ethnic Turkish immigrants speak the language with native fluency.

The number of native speakers in Turkey is about 60–67 million, corresponding to about 90–93 percent of the population, and 65–73 million native speakers exist worldwide. Turkish is spoken as a first or second language by almost all of Turkey's residents, with Kurdish making up most of the remainder (about 3,950,000 as estimated in 1980). However, most linguistic minorities in Turkey are bilingual, speaking Turkish as a second language to levels of native fluency.

Official status

Turkish is the official language of Turkey, and is one of the official languages of Cyprus. It also has official (but not primary) status in the Prizren District of Kosovo as well as several municipalities of Republic of Macedonia, depending on the concentration of Turkish-speaking local population.

In Turkey, the regulatory body for Turkish is the Turkish Language Association (Türk Dil Kurumu or TDK), which was founded in 1932 under the name Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti ("Society for Research on the Turkish Language"). The Turkish Language Association was influenced by the linguistic purism ideology and one of its primary tasks was the replacement of loanwords and foreign grammatical constructions with equivalents of Turkish origin, which, together with the adoption of the new Turkish alphabet in 1928, shaped the modern Turkish language spoken today (see below). TDK became an independent body in 1951, with the lifting of the requirement that it should be presided over by the Minister of Education. This status continued until August, 1983, when it was again made into a governmental body in the constitution of 1982 following the military coup d'état of 1980.

Dialects

Istanbul Turkish is established as the official standard language of Turkey. In spite of the levelling influence of the standard used in mass media and Turkish education system since the 1930s, dialectal variation persists. Academically, researchers from Turkey often refer to Turkish dialects as ağız or şive, leading to an ambiguity with the linguistic concept of accent, which is also covered with these same words. Projects investigating Turkish dialects are being carried out by several universities, as well as a dedicated work group of the Turkish Language Association and work is currently in progress for the compilation and publication of the research as a comprehensive dialect atlas of the Turkish language.

The standard dialect of the Turkish language is İstanbul. Rumelice is spoken by immigrants from Rumelia, and includes the distinct dialects of Deliorman, Dinler and Adakale influenced by the theoretized Balkan linguistic union. Kıbrıs is the name for Cypriot Turkish, and is spoken by the Turkish Cypriots. Edirne is the dialect of Edirne. Ege is spoken in the Aegean region, with its usage extending to Antalya. The nomadic Yörük tribes of the Mediterranean Region and the Balkan peninsula also have their own dialect of Turkish.

Güneydoğu is spoken in the southeast, to the east of Mersin. Doğu, a dialect in Eastern Anatolia, has a dialect continuum with Azeri, particularly with Karapapak dialects in some areas. The Central Anatolia region speaks Orta Anadolu. Karadeniz, spoken in the Eastern Black Sea Region and represented primarily by the Trabzon dialect, exhibits substratum influence from Greek in phonology and syntax. Kastamonu is spoken in Kastamonu and its surrounding areas. The Hemşinli dialect, known as Hemşince, is spoken by the western group of Hamshenis around Rize, influenced by Armenian. Karamanlıca is spoken in Greece, where it is also named Kαραμανλήδικα (Karamanlidika). It is the literary standard for Karamanlides.

Sounds

Consonants

The phoneme /ɣ/ usually referred to as yumuşak g ("soft g"), ğ in Turkish orthography, actually represents a rather weak front-velar or palatal approximant between front vowels. It never occurs at the beginning of a word, but always follows a vowel. When word-final or preceding another consonant, it lengthens the preceding vowel.

The sounds , and are in complementary distribution with , and , the former occurring with front vowels and the latter with back vowels. These allophones are not distinguished in the orthography, in which both series are written <k>, <g> and <l>. When a vowel is added to nouns ending with postvocalic <k>, the <k> becomes <ğ> by consonant alternation.

Vowels

IPA chart for Turkish vowels

The vowels of the Turkish language are, in their alphabetical order, a, e, ı, i, o, ö, u, ü. There are no diphthongs in Turkish and when two vowels come together, which occurs rarely and only with loanwords, each vowel retains its individual sound.

Vowel harmony

The Turkish vowel system can be considered as being two-dimensional, where vowels are characterised by two features: front/back and rounded/unrounded. Vowel harmony is the principle by which a native Turkish word incorporates either exclusively back vowels (a, ı, o, u) or exclusively front vowels (e, i, ö, ü). The pattern of vowels is shown in the table below.

Grammatical affixes have "a chameleon-like quality", and obey one of the following patterns of vowel harmony:

• twofold (-e/-a): the locative suffix, for example, is -de after front vowels and -da after back vowels. The notation -de is a convenient shorthand for this pattern.
• fourfold (-i/-ı/-ü/-u): the genitive suffix, for example, is -in or -ın after unrounded vowels (front or back respectively); and -ün or -un after the corresponding rounded vowels. In this case the shorthand notation -in is used.

The following examples, based on the copula -dir (" is"), illustrate the principles of vowel harmony in practice: Türkiye'dir ("it is Turkey"), kapıdır ("it is the door"), but gündür ("it is the day"), paltodur ("it is the coat").

There are some exceptions to the rules of vowel harmony. In compound words the vowels need not harmonize between the constituent words of the compound (thus forms like bu|gün ("today") or baş|kent ("capital") are permissible). In addition, vowel harmony does not apply in loanwords and some invariant affixes, such as -yor (present tense) and -bil- (potential). Some loanwords do, however, exhibit partial or even complete vowel harmony (e.g. mümkün "possible" < Arabic mumkin; and dürbün "binoculars" < Persian dūrbīn). There are also a few native Turkish words that do not follow the rule, such as anne ("mother"). In such words—and in loanwords as well—suffixes harmonize with the final vowel: thus annedir ("she is a mother"). The road sign in the photograph above illustrates all of these features:

• a native compound which does not obey vowel harmony: Orta|köy ("middle village"—a place name)
• a loanword also violating vowel harmony: viyadük ("viaduct" < French viaduc)
• the possessive suffix -i harmonizing with the final vowel (and softening the k by consonant alternation): viyadüğü

Stress

Stress is usually on the last syllable. Exceptions include some suffix combinations and loanwords, particularly from Italian and Greek, as well as many proper names. While such loanwords are usually stressed on the penultimate syllable (/ɫoˈkanta/ lokanta "restaurant" or /isˈkele/ iskele "quay"), the stress of proper names is less predictable (/isˈtanbuɫ/ İstanbul, /ˈaŋkaɾa/ Ankara).

Grammar

Turkish is an agglutinative language and frequently uses affixes, or endings. One word can have many affixes and these can also be used to create new words, such as creating a verb from a noun, or a noun from a verbal root (see the section on Word formation). Most affixes indicate the grammatical function of the word. The only native prefixes are alliterative intensifying syllables used with adjectives or adverbs: for example sımsıcak ("boiling hot" < sıcak) and masmavi ("bright blue" < mavi).

The extensive use of affixes can give rise to long words. It is jokingly said that the longest Turkish word is Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınız, meaning "You are said to be one of those that we couldn't manage to convert to a Czechoslovak". This example is of course contrived; but long words do frequently occur in normal Turkish, as in this heading of a newspaper obituary column: Bayramlaşamadıklarımız (Bayram -Recipr-Impot-Partic-Plur-PossPl1; "Those of our number with whom we cannot exchange the season's greetings").

Nouns

There is no definite article in Turkish, but definiteness of the object is implied when the accusative ending is used (see below). Turkish nouns decline by taking case-endings, as in Latin. There are six noun cases in Turkish, with all the endings following vowel harmony (shown in the table using the shorthand superscript notation. The plural marker -ler immediately follows the noun before any case or other affixes (e.g. köylerin "of the villages").

The accusative case marker is used only for definite objects; compare ağaç gördük "we saw a tree" with ağacı gördük "we saw the tree". The plural marker -ler is not used when a class or category is meant: ağaç gördük can equally well mean "we saw trees "—as opposed to ağaçları gördük "we saw the trees ".

The declension of ağaç illustrates two important features of Turkish phonology: consonant assimilation in suffixes (ağaçtan, ağaçta) and voicing of final consonants before vowels (ağacın, ağaca, ağacı).

Additionally, nouns can take suffixes that assign person: for example -imiz, "our". With the addition of the copula (for example -im, "I am") complete sentences can be formed. The interrogative particle mi immediately follows the word being questioned: köye mi? " to the village?", ağaç mı? " tree?".

The Turkish personal pronouns in the nominative case are ben (1s), sen (2s), o (3s), biz (1pl), siz (2pl, or formal/polite 2s), and onlar (3pl). They are declined regularly with some exceptions: benim (1s gen.); bizim (1pl gen.); bana (1s dat.); sana (2s dat.); and the oblique forms of o use the root on. All other pronouns (reflexive kendi and so on) are declined regularly.

Adjectives

Turkish adjectives are not declined. However most adjectives can also be used as nouns, in which case they are declined: e.g. güzel ("beautiful") → güzeller ("(the) beautiful ones / people"). Used attributively, adjectives precede the nouns they modify. The adjectives var ("existent") and yok ("non-existent") are used in many cases where English would use "there is" or "have", e.g. süt yok ("there is no milk", lit. "(the) milk (is) non-existent"); the construction "noun 1-GEN noun 2-POSS var/yok" can be translated "noun 1 has/doesn't have noun 2"; imparatorun elbisesi yok "the emperor has no clothes" ("(the) emperor-of clothes-his non-existent"); kedimin ayakkabıları yoktu ("my cat had no shoes", lit. "cat-my-of shoe-plur.-its non-existent-past tense").

Verbs

Turkish verbs indicate person. They can be made negative, potential ("can") or impotential ("cannot"). Furthermore, Turkish verbs show tense (present, past, inferential, future, and aorist), mood (conditional, imperative, necessitative, and optative), and aspect. Negation is expressed by the infix -me- immediately following the stem.

All Turkish verbs are conjugated in the same way, except for the irregular and defective verb i-, the Turkish copula, which can be used in compound forms (the shortened form is called an enclitic): Gelememişti = Gelememiş idi = Gelememiş + i- + -di

Participles

Turkish has several participles, including present (with the ending -en), future (-ecek), past (-miş) and aorist (-er or -ir). These forms can function as either adjectives or nouns: oynamayan çocuklar "children who do not play", oynamayanlar "those who do not play"; okur yazar "reader-writer = literate", okur yazarlar "literates".

The most important function of participles is to form modifying phrases equivalent to the relative clauses found in most European languages. The participles used in these constructions are the future (-ecek) and an older form (-dik), which covers both present and past meanings. The use of these "personal" or "relative" participles is illustrated in the following table, in which the examples are presented according to the grammatical case which would be seen in the equivalent English relative clause.

Word order

Word order in simple Turkish sentences is generally Subject Object Verb, as in Japanese and Latin, but unlike in English. In more complex sentences the basic rule is that the qualifier precedes the qualified: this principle includes, as an important special case, the participial modifiers discussed above. The definite precedes the indefinite: thus çocuğa hikâyeyi anlattı "she told the child the story", but hikâyeyi bir çocuğa anlattı "she told the story to a child".

It is possible to alter the word order to stress the importance of a certain word or phrase. The main rule is that the word before the verb has the stress without exception. For example, if one wants to say "Hakan went to school" with a stress on the word "school" (okul, the indirect object) it would be "Hakan okula gitti". If the stress is to be placed on "Hakan" (the subject), it would be "Okula Hakan gitti" which means "it's Hakan who went to school".

Vocabulary

The 2005 edition of Güncel Türkçe Sözlük, the official dictionary of the Turkish language published by Turkish Language Association, contains 104,481 entries, of which about 14% are of foreign origin. Among the most significant foreign contributors to Turkish vocabulary are Arabic, French, Persian, Italian, English, and Greek.

Word formation

Turkish extensively uses agglutination to form new words from nouns and verbal stems. The majority of Turkish words originate from the application of derivative suffixes to a relatively small set of core vocabulary.

An example set of words derived from a substantive root:

Another example, starting from a verbal root:

New words are also frequently formed by compounding two existing words into a new one, as in German. A few examples of compound words are given below:

Writing system

Turkish is written using a modified version of the Latin alphabet introduced in 1928 by Atatürk to replace the Arabic-based Ottoman Turkish alphabet. The Ottoman alphabet marked only three different vowels—long ā, ū and ī—and included several redundant consonants such as variants of z (which were distinguished in Arabic but not in Turkish). The omission of short vowels in the Arabic script made it particularly unsuitable for Turkish, which has eight vowels.

The reform of the script was an important step in the cultural reforms of the period. The task of preparing the new alphabet and selecting the necessary modifications for sounds specific to Turkish was entrusted to a Language Commission composed of prominent linguists, academics and writers. The introduction of the new Turkish alphabet was supported by public education centers opened throughout the country, cooperation with publishing companies, and encouragement by Atatürk himself, who toured the country teaching the new letters to the public. There was a dramatic increase in literacy from its original Third World levels.

Turkish now has an alphabet suited to the sounds of the language: the spelling is largely phonetic, with one letter corresponding to each phoneme. Most of the letters are used approximately as in English, the main exceptions being <c>, which denotes , as in the English word jail, and the undotted <ı>, representing the close back unrounded vowel . The letter <ğ> in principle denotes , but has the property of lengthening the preceding vowel and assimilating any subsequent vowel (e.g. soğuk "cold" is pronounced ). The letters <ş> and <ç> represent and respectively, as in English shall and chill.

Sample

Dostlar Beni Hatırlasın by Aşık Veysel Şatıroğlu (1894–1973), a minstrel and highly regarded poet in the Turkish folk literature tradition.

See also

• Turkish alphabet
• Turkish Sign Language
• Turkish literature
• Turkish folk literature
• List of replaced loanwords in Turkish
• List of English words of Turkic origin
• Turkish exonyms

Notes

1. Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.) (2005). "Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Language Family Trees - Altaic". Retrieved 2007-03-18. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
2. ^ Katzner
3. "Language Materials Project: Turkish". UCLA International Institute, Center for World Languages. February 2007. Retrieved 2007-04-26.
4. Ishjatms
5. Findley
6. Soucek
7. Taeuber, Irene B. (1958). "Population and Modernization in Turkey". Population Index. 24 (2): 110. OCLC 41483131. Retrieved 2007-04-27. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |laysource= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)|thumb|right|300px]]
8. See Lewis (2002) for a thorough treatment of the Turkish language reform.
9. ^ Turkish Language Association. "Türk Dil Kurumu - Tarihçe (History of the Turkish Language Association)". Retrieved 2007-03-18. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)Template:Tr icon
10. Lewis (2002): 2–3.
11. Mütercim Asım, "Burhân-ı Katı Tercemesi", İstanbul 1799.
12. Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.) (2005). "Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Report for language code:tur (Turkish)". Retrieved 2007-03-18. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
13. Center for Studies on Turkey, University of Essen (2003). "The European Turks: Gross Domestic Product, Working Population, Entrepreneurs and Household Data" (PDF). Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association. Retrieved 2007-01-06. {{cite web}}: External link in |author= (help)
14. TNS Opinion & Social (February 2006), Special Eurobarometer 243 / Wave 64.3: Europeans and their Languages (PDF), European Commission Directorate of General Press and Communication, retrieved 2007-03-28 {{citation}}: External link in |author= (help)
15. Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.) (2005). "Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Report for language code:kmr (Kurdish)". Retrieved 2007-03-18. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
16. The name TDK itself exemplifies this process. The words tetkik and cemiyet in the original name are both Arabic loanwords (the final -i of cemiyeti being a Turkish possessive suffix); kurum is a native Turkish word based on the verb kurmak, "set up, found".
17. Johanson, Lars (2001). "Discoveries on the Turkic linguistic map" (PDF). Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. Retrieved 2007-03-18. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
18. Özsoy
19. Akalın, Şükrü Haluk (2003). "Türk Dil Kurumu'nun 2002 yılı çalışmaları (Turkish Language Association progress report for 2002)" (PDF). Türk Dili. 85 (613). ISSN 1301-465X. Retrieved 2007-03-18. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)Template:Tr icon
20. Brendemoen, B. (1996), "Phonological Aspects of Greek-Turkish Language Contact in Trabzon", Conference on Turkish in Contact, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Wassenaar, 5–6 February, 1996
21. Vaux, Bert (2001). "Hemshinli: The Forgotten Black Sea Armenians" (PDF). Harvard University. Retrieved 2007-04-24. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
22. ^ Handbook of the IPA, p. 155
23. This rule does not apply to monosyllabic nouns. Lewis (2001):10.
24. Note that this table is essentially the same as the IPA vowel chart shown above: both table and chart indicate the physical location and quality of each vowel.
25. Lewis (1953):21
26. For the terms twofold and fourfold, as well as the superscript notation, see Lewis (1953):21–22. In his more recent works Lewis prefers to omit the superscripts, on the grounds that "there is no need for this once the principle has been grasped" (Lewis :18).
27. In Lewis's marvellously precise formulation, "The effect of vowel harmony extends to non-Turkish words too, bringing as many vowels as possible of a foreign borrowing into one class, or pressing a foreign borrowing whose vowels happen to be all of one class still further into Turkish form." Lewis (2001): 17.
28. This section draws heavily on Lewis (2001) and, to a lesser extent, Lewis (1953). Only the most important references are specifically flagged with footnotes.
29. see Lewis (2001) Ch XIV.
30. "The prefix, which is accented, is modelled on the first syllable of the simple adjective or adverb but with the substitution of m, p, r, or s for the last consonant of that syllable." Lewis (2001):55. The prefix retains the first vowel of the base form and thus exhibits a form of reverse vowel harmony.
31. This "splendid word" appeared at the time of Bayram, the festival marking the end of the month of fasting. Lewis (2001):287.
32. Because it is also used for the indefinite accusative, Lewis uses the term "absolute case" in preference to "nominative". Lewis (2001):28.
33. See Lewis (2001):163–165, 260–262 for an exhaustive treatment.
34. For the terms personal and relative participle see Lewis (1958):98 and Lewis (2001):163 respectively. Most of the examples are taken from Lewis (2001).
35. Lewis (2001): 239–240.
36. "Güncel Türkçe Sözlük". Turkish Language Association. 2005. Retrieved 2007-03-21.Template:Tr icon
37. "Türkçe Sözlük (2005)'teki Sözlerin Kökenlerine Ait Sayısal Döküm (Numerical list on the origin of words in Türkçe Sözlük (2005))". Turkish Language Association. 2005. Retrieved 2007-03-21.Template:Tr icon
38. Dilaçar, Agop (1977). "Atatürk ve Yazım". Türk Dili. 35 (307). ISSN 1301-465X. Retrieved 2007-03-19.Template:Tr icon
39. Coulmas, pp. 243–244
40. "Americans will recognize in it the first vowel of Missouri as pronounced by a native of that state." Lewis (2001):13.

References

External links

• LangToLang Turkish-to-many Dictionary
• BBC Turkish, including online Turkish radio service
• Sözlerin Soyağacı: Online Turkish etymological dictionary

Linguistics

• Ethnologue: Languages of the World (unknown ed.). SIL International.
• Turkish language at the Rosetta Project archive
• Turkish language at Language Museum

Learning resources

• Turkish lessons at the University of Arizona
• Turkish Language Class free online Turkish course
• United States Foreign Service Institute free online Turkish Basic Course

Turkish editions of Wikimedia projects

• Vikipedi, Turkish Misplaced Pages
• VikiKaynak, Turkish Wikisource
• Vikisöz, Turkish Wikiquote

v t e Turkic languages
Proto-language	Proto-Turkic
Common Turkic	Argu Argu Khalaj Karluk Western Northern Uzbek Southern Uzbek Eastern Ili Turki Uyghur Khoton Lop Äynu Old Chagatai Karakhanid Khorezmian Kipchak Bulgar Bashkir Tatar Mishar Tatar Nagaibak Old Tatar Cuman Armeno-Kipchak Crimean Tatar Cuman Karachay-Balkar Karaim Krymchak Kumyk Mamluk-Kipchak Urum Kyrgyz Fergana Kipchak Kyrgyz Pamir Kyrgyz Siberian Tatar Baraba Tom Southern Altai Telengit Teleut Nogai Dobrujan Tatar Karakalpak Kazakh Nogai Siberian Tatar Tobol-Irtysh Oghuz Salar Eastern Khorasani Turkic Turkmen Trukhmen Southern Afshari Chaharmahali Turkic Qashqai Sonqori Western Azerbaijani North Azerbaijani South Azerbaijani Ajem-Turkic Balkan Gagauz Gagauz Karapapakh Turkish Karamanli Turkish Old Anatolian Turkish Ottoman Turkish Siberian Northern Dolgan Yakut Southern Chulym Lower Chulym Sayan Steppe Tuvan Taiga Dukhan Soyot Tofa Yenisei Fuyu Kyrgyz Khakas Northern Altai Chelkan Kumandy Tuba Shor Western Yugur Old Old Uyghur Orkhon Turkic
Oghur	Bulgar Chuvash
Disputed classification	Khazar Pecheneg
Potentially Turkic languages	Di Hunnic Jie Pannonian Avar Tuoba Wusun Xiongnu
Creoles and pidgins	Hezhou Kurbet Qoqmončaq
Italics indicate extinct languages Languages between parentheses are varieties of the language on their left.

Template:Turkey-related topics

• Turkic languages
• Agglutinative languages
• Languages of Azerbaijan
• Languages of Bulgaria
• Languages of Cyprus
• Languages of the Republic of Macedonia
• Languages of Turkey
• Turkish language
• Vowel harmony languages
• Languages of Kosovo
• Languages of Germany