Turkish, one of the Turkic languages, is being spoken in Turkey, Cyprus, the Balkans and Western Europe, Asia and Caucasia. Turkish belongs to the Western Oguz group of the southwestern branch of the Turkic languages which scholars consider it belonging to the Altaic family of languages. 

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History

Turkish is one of the best-documented Turkic languages. Most scholars consider that the earliest history of written Turkic dates back to the inscriptions located in Mongolia in the 8th century. Southwestern Oguz tribes were distributed over a broad territory in Central Asia and the Middle East. Today their descendants live in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Azerbaycan, Turkey, the Balkans, and other countries of the Balkans and the Middle East.
Literary Turkish developed in Anatolia under the Seljuks and Ottomans, whose written documents can be traced to before the 13th century. Turkish can be classified into three major historical periods:  Old Anatolian Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, and modern Turkish.   The Ottoman Turkish was lasted under the influence of Arabic and Persian from 13th to 19th century while the modern Turkish literary language was shaped during the 19th and 20th centuries under the influence of Arabic and Persian as well as European languages and cultures.

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Language Reform
Modern Turkish, relatively purified of Arabic and Persian words, took form after the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The language reform movement started as a grassroot movement during the Ottoman period and  led by the government of Republic of Turkey ( It is, also, known in Turkish as dil devrimi or ‘language revolution’). The movement aimed to reduce the influence of Arabic and Persian on Turkish in order to serve the foundation of the political philosophy of the Republic of Turkey which reduced influence of Islam and turned the country towards the modern West. The Turkish Linguistic Society (Türk Dil Kurumu) has been the official authority on Turkish language since 1934.  The Society accepted that modern standard Turkish is based on the Istanbul dialect. Turkish is the official language of Republic of Turkey and serves as the main component of Turkish national identity.
 

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Population

Approximately 85% of the population of Turkey speaks Turkish as a first language, although many other ethnic groups such as Kurds, Greek, Judeo-Spanish Ladinos, Armenians, Serbo-Croatians, Circassians, Georgians, Laz, Arabs, etc. live in Turkey. There is no official statistic about ethic groups who speak any Turkic languages in Turkey other than Turkish. The official language as well as the language of education must be Turkish according to the constitution.
Turkish is also spoken by people who live in a large geography outside of Turkey  in territories which used to form a part of the Ottoman Empire. Albanians, Macedonians, and others adopted Turkish under the Ottoman Empire. There is a considerable number of people speaking Turkish as a first language in Bulgaria. Turks were settled in Cyprus in the sixteenth century by the Ottoman government. In 1974, the northern part of Cyprus became the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus under Turkey’s protection. A group of Turkish speaking people living in Georgia who are called Meshkhetians or Ahiska Turks who were deported to Central Asia by the government of the Soviet Union still speak Turkish as their native language.  Finally, Turkish is spoken by more than 3 million migrant workers who went to western, central and the northern Europe, (Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, etc.) during the 1960s and 1970s.  In addition to the population of Turkey and former guest workers throughout Europe, Turkish is spoken by indigenous populations in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Macedonia, Romania, and Bosnia as well as Syria and Lebanon, as their mother tongues. 

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Alphabets

Turkish has been written since 1928 using the Latin alphabet which replaced the Arabic alphabet used by Ottoman Turks.

 

Sound System

The Latin alphabet has 29 characters including 8 vowels a,e,ı,i,o,ö,u,ü and 21 consonants b,c,ç,d,f,g,ğ,h,j,k,l,m,n,p,r,s,ş,t,v,y,z. 
The Turkish vowel system is based on the oppositions of front vs. back, high vs. low and unrounded vs. rounded sounds. Officially standard Turkish has  a total of eight vowels, four of which are back (a, ı, o, u) and four of which are front (e, i, ö, ü); four are unrounded  (a,e, ı,i) and four are rounded (o,ö,u ü); and four are high (ı,i,u,ü) and four are low (a,e,o,ö). Turkish has a strong tendency for vowel harmony, with syllables within a word usually sharing front or back harmony; the last syllable governs the quality of sounds in the following suffixes. Most suffixes are alternative forms based on the last syllable  of the stem, as in çocuk (stem)-lar (suffix), çilek(stem)-ler(suffix). 

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Syntax

Turkish has an elaborate and highly regular system of sentence constructions. Word order is Subject+Object+Verb. 

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