Türkçe

Türkçe, the Turkish language, is a member of the Turkic language family, within the Oghuz branch. It is the official language of the Republic of Türkiye and serves as a lingua franca in Northern Cyprus. It is spoken by around 75 million native speakers in Türkiye and by millions of expatriates and diaspora communities in Europe and elsewhere. It uses vowel harmony and an agglutinative morphology, forming words through suffix chains. Turkish is written primarily with a Latin-based alphabet introduced in 1928.

Historically, Turkish evolved from Old Anatolian Turkish and Ottoman Turkish; the modern form emerged through language reform in the early Republic period, leading to significant simplification of grammar and a reorganization of vocabulary with many Turkish neologisms and some loanwords. The standard language is largely based on the Istanbul dialect, with regional varieties. The Turkish alphabet has 29 letters, including the characters ç, ğ, ı, İ, ö, ü, and ş. It is notably agglutinative, with suffixes denoting tense, mood, voice, person, case, and other grammatical categories, and it often expresses complex ideas in compact units.

In contemporary Turkey, Turkish is the language of public administration, education, media, and literature. It is also widely studied as a foreign language. The Turkish Language Institution (Türk Dil Kurumu) and other bodies oversee orthography, vocabulary development, and standardization. Turkish shares features with other Turkic languages, such as agglutination and vowel harmony, while maintaining distinct phonology and lexicon. In addition to Turkey, Turkish is spoken by minorities and immigrants in Europe and the Caucasus.