Turkish

	Turkish: Türkçe
	Language family: Turkic
	Dialects: Cypriot, Karamanli
	Writing System: Latin (Turkish variant)
	Official in: Turkey, Cyprus, Northern Cyprus

The language

Turkish belongs to a language family that includes thirty Turkic languages spoken in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia. The differences among these languages are much smaller than their close similarities.

Like Finnish and Hungarian, Turkish is an agglutinative language. Agglutination refers to the process of adding suffixes to a root-word, so that a single word can convey what English would take a complete sentence to say. For example, the English sentence “They were not coming” is a single word in Turkish: “come” is the root word, and elements meaning “not,” “-ing,” “they,” and “were” (past tense marker) are all suffixed to it: Gelmiyorlardı. The regularity and predictability in Turkish of how these suffixes are added make agglutination easier to internalize than you might think.

Turkish has postpositions rather than prepositions, and objects usually precede verbs. So the sentence “Ahmet talked about his class” would have the following word order in Turkish: “Ahmet his class about talked.” While this may seem strange at first, you’ll be surprised how quickly this new word order comes to feel natural when you’re learning Turkish.

Studying Turkish also lays a solid foundation for learning other modern Turkic languages, like Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Uzbek, and Uighur. The Turkic languages are closely related and some of them are even mutually intelligible. Many of these languages are spoken in regions like the Caucasus, the Balkans, China, and the former Soviet Union. Mastery of Turkish grammar makes learning other Turkic languages exponentially easier.

Adapted from: http://www.bu.edu/mlcl/home/why-study-turkish/

Turkish speakers worldwide

	Speakers	Country
	Official Language	Turkey, Cyprus, Northern Cyprus ;; Kosovo, Macedonia (Both municipal Level)
	1 000 000+	Germany
	500 000 - 1 000 000	Bulgaria, Greece, Iraq
	100 000 - 500 000	Austria, Belgium, France, Netherlands, USA, Uzbekistan
	25 000 - 100 000	Australia, Azerbaijan, Canada, Denmark, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, UK
	0 - 25 000	Rest of World