An Overview of the Turkish Language
Turkish, also referred to as Istanbul Turkish, is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 10–15 million native speakers in Southeast Europe and 60–65 million native speakers in Western Asia. The distinctive characteristics of Turkish are vowel harmony and extensive agglutination. It allows the construction of words by adding many suffixes to a word stem. It has no noun classes or grammatical gender and uses the word order subject-object-verb.
The History of Turkish
The earliest known Turkic inscriptions are the three monumental Orkhon inscriptions found in modern Mongolia. Erected in honour of Prince Kul Tigin, Emperor Bilge Khan, and Bayn Tsokto. After the discovery and excavation of these monuments and associated stone slabs by Russian archaeologists in the wider area surrounding the Orkhon Valley between 1889 and 1893, it became established that the language on the inscriptions was the Old Turkic language written using the Orkhon script, which has also been referred to as "Turkic runes" or "runiform" due to a superficial similarity to the Germanic runic alphabets.
Interesting Turkish Language Facts:
The longest word in the Turkish language used in a text is “muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine" which has 70 letters. It is derived from the noun "muvaffakiyet" (success) and means “As though you are from those whom we may not be able to easily make into a maker of unsuccessful ones”.
Turkish and Japanese have a very similar sentence structure.
Because of the language reform in the 1920s that simplified the vocabulary and changed from the Arabic script to the Latin alphabet, learning Turkish is now easier than you think.
Turkish was previously written using the Arabic script, but now it uses the Western Latin Alphabet.
Learning Turkish
Turkish is one of the world's 15 most widely spoken languages. The Republic of Turkey is strategically and geographically connected to Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East, so knowing how to speak the Turkish language is an advantage if you are interested in dealing with international business or pursuing a career in those areas. Learning Turkish will help you understand better their rich culture and get access to better opportunities.
Learning Turkish with Overpass Apps
Overpass has a passion for providing enjoyable language learning apps, thus you can experience the beauty of Turkish and other languages with Overpass language apps. We have created our new Learn Turkish Bubble Bath which includes 630 Turkish words divided into 63 challenging categories. Just tap on a bubble, hear the word spoken by a native speaker, and select the translation to pop the bubble. You will increase your Turkish vocabulary as you play and have fun.
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