Turkish language

Turkish (Türkçe), the most western of the Turkic languages, belongs to the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family. It has the largest number of speakers of all the Turkic languages and there is a significant degree of mutual intelligibility between Turkish and other Oghuz languages such as Azerbaijani, Turkmen and Qashqai. Turkish is a Turkic language spoken by about 88 million people, mainly in Turkey, but also in Northern Cyprus, Germany, Bulgaria and other countries.

There are about 82 million Turkish speakers in Turkey; about 2 million in Germany; 606,000 in Bulgaria; 500,000 in the UK; 300,000 in Northern Cyprus; 165,000 in the USA; and 130,000 in Uzbekistan. Turkish is an official language in Turkey and Cyprus. It is recognized as a minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, Iraq, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Romania. Turkish is a member of the Oghuz branch of the Turkic language family. It is closely related to Azeri, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz and Balkan Turkish, and there is considerable mutual intelligibility between these languages. The ancestor of the modern Turk, Oghuz, was brought to Anatolia from Central Asia during the 11th century AD by the Seljuk Turks.

This derived into Ottoman Turkish, which had many words borrowed from Arabic and Persian. Until 1928, Turkish was written with a version of the Persian-Arabic alphabet, known as Ottoman Turkish alphabet. In 1928, in an attempt to modernize Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk issued a decree replacing the Arabic alphabet with a Latinized alphabet that has been used ever since. The Arabic and Turkish loanwords were replaced by their Turkish counterparts. Today, only scholars and those who learned to read before 1928 can read Turkish written in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet.

Who speaks Turkish

Turkish is the official language of Turkey, where it is spoken by 67 million people as a first language and 350,000 as a second language. It is also an official language in Cyprus, along with Greek. The remaining Turkish speakers live in 35 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and the Americas. Most of these countries were part of the territory formerly dominated by the Ottoman Empire, with a world population of Turkish speakers estimated at up to 71 million.

Dialects of Turkish

Turkish has several dialects. The following are known as dialects: Danubian, Dinler, Edirne, Eskisehir, Gaziantep, Karamanli, Razgrad, Rumelian and Urfa. Modern standard Turkish is based on the variant spoken in Istanbul, the country's largest city.

Translation agency for Spanish-English-Turkish

Now that you know a little more about the Turkish language, you might be interested to know that we offer professional translation services from both English to Turkish and from Turkish into English. We specialise in translation from and into Spanish.

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