History of the Turkish language

The Turkish language has very ancient roots. It belongs to the Turkic branch of the great Altaic language family, which gets its name from the area bordered by the Altai Mountains of north-eastern Asia in which it is thought to have originated. These mountains extend over a thousand miles from the Gobi Desert to the West Siberian Plain. They take their name from a Turkish-Mongolian word altan, 'golden'.

Altaic family languages share a number of features which are prominent in modern Turkish: vowel harmonisation and agglutination, no definite articles, no grammatical gender and no prepositions; finite verbs formed from verb roots plus personal suffixes; a double genitive in which both possessor and possessed are modified and the possessed precedes the possessor; widespread use of 'verbal nominals' - these are words built on a verb root which can function as nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. These compound words play an important part in sentence formation, encapsulating what would require a phrase in English and fulfilling the role of relative clauses (see separate Learning Turkish and Vowel Harmony).

The first written records in a Turkic language go back to Mongolia in the 8th century ad. A 'runic' script was used which was widely prevalent. Later the majority of Turkic peoples adopted the Arabic script upon their conversion to Islam in the 11th century. In 1928 Kemel Atatürk, as part of his Westernizing project, introduced language reforms which included Romanization of the Turkish alphabet.

The original Turkic peoples, like their Mongol, Tungu and Hun neighbours, were nomadic. They took part in the great waves of migration from the steppes whose impact was felt in the early Middle Ages throughout Eurasia. Modern Turkish has its origins in the language spoken by the Oguz branch of the Turkic peoples who spread out from western Turkestan towards the Caucasus, Iran, Anatolia and the Balkans. Oguz nomads entered Anatolia in large numbers in the 11th century, and settled in its eastern and central regions after defeating Byzantine forces. From this territorial foothold the Ottoman Empire developed, becoming a world power that absorbed parts of Europe, Africa and Arabia and endured for six centuries. Modern Turkey emerged from its collapse in 1922.

Turkish is the main Turkic language, spoken throughout Turkey and by significant numbers in the Balkans, Romania and Bulgaria, in northern Cyprus, and in some Arab countries. There has been a significant Turkish diaspora and Turkish speakers are scattered throughout the world. Germany in particular has been a focus for Turkish immigration.

The Turkish language shows the influence of the many different cultures it has come into contact with over the course of its long history. After the adoption of Islam, Persian and Arabic became the major influences and the official language of the Ottoman Empire, referred to as Ottoman Turkish, reflected this. After the foundation of the Turkish Republic the language reform initiated by Kemel Atatürk not only Romanized the Turkish alphabet but also 'purified' the language by removing many Persian and Arabic loanwords from official discourse. New words were derived from Turkish roots to replace them and Old Turkish words which had fallen into disuse were brought back into circulation.