INFORMATION ABOUT TURKISH
LANGUAGE
Turkish is the mother tongue
of 90 percent of the population of the
country. Some 70 other languages and
dialects are also spoken, including various
dialects of Caucasian and Kurdish as well as
Arabic, Greek, Ladino and Armenian. The
Turkish language of Turkey represents the
southwestern arm of the community of Turkic
languages within the Ural-Altay linguistic
family that slowly evolved over time. Groups
speaking these languages spread to the east
and northeast out of Central Asia, and
particularly to the west. Ever since the
very earliest times, Turkish has influenced
various dialects of Middle Persian, and
turned the Caucasus and Anatolia away from
the Indo-European group of languages. With
the acceptance of Islam, Arabic on the one
hand and Persian on the other had a clear
influence on the Turkish language. Since the
end of the 19th century such modern Turkic
written languages as the Turkish of Turkey
itself, Azerbaijan and Kazakh Turkish, based
on Turkish dialects, have emerged. Of the
4,000 or so languages currently spoken in
the world, Turkish ranks seventh in terms of
numbers of speakers and area, being used by
around 200 million people.
Ever since the 8th century,
the Turks have employed a number of
alphabets, although mainly the Göktürk,
Uyghur, Arabic and Latin ones. After the
foundation of the Republic and the
establishment of national unity, and
particularly between 1923 and 1928, people
began to focus on the alphabet problem in
Turkey. The founder of the Republic, Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, believed that it was
essential to make use of Western culture in
order for the country to reach the level of
contemporary civilisation, to which end, in
1928, he brought about the acceptance of
Latin letters, modified to reflect the
sounds of the Turkish language, to replace
the Arabic alphabet.
The Language Revolution
continued in 1932 with Ataturk's
establishment of the Turkish Language
Research Society in order to simplify the
language. After its foundation, that body
took the name of the Turkish Language Board.
Its work produced positive results, and
important steps were taken in order to
simplify Turkish and rid it of its Arabic
and Persian words. The Turkish Language
Board is still active today, with amended
statutes, within the main body of the
Language and History Higher Board. Among the
board's responsibilities are the
simplification, enrichment and
beautification of the Turkish language. The
most important result of the work carried
out to date is that while before 1932
Turkish words represented only 35-40 percent
of the lexicon, that figure has today
reached 75-80 percent. This fact is the
greatest proof of the value to the Turkish
people of Ataturk's Language Revolution. |