About Turkish

Turkish is spoken in a wide area from today's Mongolia, the Balkans, East Europe, Anatolia, Iraq and northern Africa, as well a Turkey of course. There are around 10 to 15 million native speakers in Southeast Europe and 60 to 65 million native speakers in Western Asia, largely Anatolia / modern day Turkey. Due to the distances involved, various dialects and accents have emerged.

In Cyprus, Turkish and Greek are the official languages with Turkish spoken by 19 percent of the population, especially in the North (KKTC). Over 1.5 million speakers are found in Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Greece and over 2.5 million speakers in Germany (and other northern European countries). About 50,000 Turkish speakers live in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan, with another 40,000 in the United States.

The most famous Turkish person is Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who was a Turkish army officer, revolutionary and the first president of Turkey. He is credited with being the founder of the republic of Turkey. His government also carried out an extensive policy of Turkification. The principles of Atatürk’s reforms, upon which modern Turkey was established, are referred to as Kemalism. His achievements in Turkey are an enduring monument to Atatürk.

Turkish is agglutinative, meaning its grammatical functions are indicated by adding various suffixes to stems. There is no grammatical gender. There is no definite article; the number 'one' may be used as an indefinite article. Nouns are declined in three declensions with six case endings. umber is marked by a plural suffix. Verbs agree with their subjects in case and number, and, as in nouns, separate identifiable suffixes perform these functions. The order of elements in a verb form is: verb stem tense aspect marker subject affix. Subject-Object-Verb word order in Turkish is a typical Turkic characteristic. As a SOV language where objects precede the verb, Turkish has post positions rather than prepositions, and relative clauses that precede the verb. Turkish has 8 vowels, and 21 consonants.

The entries in the four sections of Frazebook for Turkish give, as with the other languages, some basic greetings, taking things further, buying some simple food and numbers.

The phrases given in Frazebook are just a start of course. We hope that you will enjoy learning them if you plan to visit Turkey or any of the countries that speak Turkish and that they may be the start of learning the language in more depth as time goes by.