turkiska

Turkiska refers to the Turkish language (Türkçe in Turkish) and, in some contexts, to the Swedish term for Turkish. It is a Turkic language spoken primarily in Turkey and Northern Cyprus, with sizable communities across Europe (notably Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria) and smaller populations in the Middle East and the Balkans. It is the most widely spoken language of the Turkic family and belongs to the Oghuz branch of Southwestern Turkic.

Historically, Turkish descends from Oghuz Turkic varieties. Ottoman Turkish, used from the late medieval period into the early modern era, incorporated many Persian and Arabic loanwords and was written in a variant of the Arabic script. In 1928, as part of Atatürk’s reforms, the language adopted a Latin-based alphabet and underwent standardization to form Modern Turkish, which is the basis of formal education and media today.

The Turkish writing system uses a Latin alphabet consisting of 29 letters. It features vowel harmony, an agglutinative morphology system with extensive suffixation, and a subject–object–verb (SOV) word order. The language has no grammatical gender and relies on a wide range of suffixes to mark tense, aspect, mood, case, number, and possession. Turkish vocabulary has expanded with coinages and calques to accommodate modern concepts.

Dialects exist across regions, but Standard Turkish is largely based on the Istanbul variety. The language holds official status in Turkey and in Northern Cyprus, and it is widely taught as a foreign language in schools and universities around the world, contributing to a broad Turkish-speaking diaspora.