The Turkish Language and Its Alphabet

THE TURKISH LANGUAGE is spread over a large geographical area in Europe and Asia. The language goes back 5500 years, perhaps even 8500. Spoken by approximately 200 million people, it is one of the most widely spoken tongues in the world. It is spoken in the Azeri, the Türkmen, the Tartar, the Uzbek, the Baskurti, the Nogay, the Kyrgyz, the Kazakh, the Yakuti, the Cuvas and other dialects. Turkish is a very ancient language, with a flawless phonetic, morphological and syntactic structure, and at the same time possesses a wealth of vocabulary. The fundamental features which distinguish the Ural-Altaic languages from the Indo-European are as follows:

- Vowel harmony, a feature of all Ural-Altaic tongues.
- The absence of gender.
- Agglutination
- Adjectives precede nouns.
- Verbs come at the end of the sentence.


Turkish Alphabet

After the republic was founded and national unity was ensured, especially between 1923-1928, the problem of the alphabet was given a lot of attention. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, believed that it was also necessary to benefit from the Western culture in order to attain a contemporary level of civilization in the new Turkey, and with this objective, he ensured the acceptance, in 1928, of the Latin alphabet that had been prepared according to the vocal harmony of Turkish rather than the Arabic alphabet. The 29 lettered Turkish alphabet does not have the X, W, Q but instead has the Ç, Ğ, I, Ö, Ş, Ü letters.

The Language Reform continued with the founding by Ataturk, in 1932, of the Turkish Language Research Society with the objective of simplifying and purifying the language. The activities of the Society, which became the Turkish Linguistic Association after a period of time, produced positive results and important steps were taken to simplify the Turkish language by purifying it of Arabic and Persian words. Today, the Turkish Linguistic Association continues its activities with a reorganized statute within the structure of the Ataturk Cultural, Linguistic and Historical Higher Council established in 1983. The purification, simplification, enrichment and enhancement of Turkish are among the responsibilities of this organization. The most important result of the positive studies made up until the present related to the Turkish language is the fact that the ratio of the use of Turkish words in the written language, which was 35-40 percent prior to 1932, has reached around 75-80 percent at the present. This fact is the most important proof that the Language Reform made by Ataturk became the property of the public.