Who are the Turks really? Official languages ​​of Turkey What language do Turks speak?

State language is Turkish, locally used Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Gagauz, Kabardian and others. Writing based on the Latin alphabet (write By-Turkish in Arabic letters is prohibited by law).

In the field of tourism it is widely common English, French and German languages. Most merchants in the resort area Antalya — Marmaris and some areas of Istanbul are not bad understand Russian language. In the interior of the country and especially at the extreme east the population does not speak foreign languages at all. It is advisable to have basic Turkish with you phrasebook, this will make life much easier for tourists.

Turkish language is one of the the most young languages ​​of the region, in modern form formed only in the middle - end of the 19th century. And then same time it is based on one of the most ancient languages Asia — Oghuz(Turkic sub-branch of the Altai family), runic the inscriptions on which, dated to the 8th century our era, are found in abundance along the upper reaches of the river Orkhon, near modern Ulaanbaatar.

Oguz was strongly influenced by Persian and Arabic languages already after the resettlement of the Turks to the territory of Asia Minor, and after education Ottoman Empire he absorbed a bunch of Slavic, Caucasian, Greek and Italian word forms. In 1277 Shems ed-Din Mehmet (Shamsuddin Mehmet) proclaims Turkish is the official language, he begins yours becoming one of the most widespread in the region, and beyond subsequent centuries the picture is reversed - many Turkish words “migrate” to the languages ​​of other peoples.

After becoming Republic of Turkey some Arabic and Persian word forms were replaced by Turkish ones (interestingly, when absence analogues simply took words from the ancient Oghuz language), and all citizens of the country were legally obliged speak and write only in Turkish. Government founded and supported many historical and linguistic societies dedicated to research and develop local linguistic traditions.

1. In Turkey, tap water is suitable for consumption, but it is still better not to risk it and drink bottled water.
2. If you feel unwell, it is better to go to the clinic at the Russian Embassy, ​​since medical care in Turkey is paid.

3. Keep in mind that the police in Turkey are quite harsh. For her, such actions as stopping a pedestrian on the street and conducting an inspection are in the order of things. Therefore, always carry your hotel voucher and passport with you.

4. If you take photographs on the street, then keep in mind that men can only be photographed with their personal permission, and from photographing Turkish women It's better to abstain altogether.

5. Don't drink alcoholic drinks and beer in public places.

Before 1991 publications, radio and television programs in any language other than Turkish, Here were simply prohibited, but in schools in quality foreign languages ​​were taught Western European languages ​​and Arabic. As a result, by now formed very flexible and modern literary language, corresponding to the historical roots of the people, and freely adaptable To modern trends. That's it now restrictions for use foreign languages on territories countries are removed, and many Turks are doing pretty well They say both in English or German, and in Russian or in Arabic.

There are more than one and a half dozens dialects of the Turkish language. The basis of literary language today forms the Istanbul dialect, formed based on a highly modified "Ottoman"(official language of the Ottoman Empire, almost 2/3 consisting of borrowings from Arabic and Persian). Used writing based on Latin script, accepted at direct insistence and with direct participation Ataturk in 1928.

Our compatriots are already accustomed to the fact that during a holiday in Turkey there are no language barriers in communication. Most of those with whom tourists have to communicate speak several languages, including Russian.

There are 29 in the Turkish alphabet letters, and each sound corresponds to a letter, which simplifies reading. However, the abundance of compound words and enough cumbersome semantic structures, appeared as a result of replacing many borrowed words ancient Oghuz roots, greatly complicates perception modern Turkish even to representatives related him peoples, for example Azerbaijanis.

A similarity many when writing them in various decorative fonts makes it very difficult to navigate street names, cities and districts. This follows add huge quantity cities and villages with exactly the same names, which makes it even more difficult search problem on the ground and on maps. Populated ones alone points with the name Karaagac, for example, in the country near 40!

WITH economic development Turkey, with the increasing importance of this country on the world stage, the popularity of the Turkish language is also increasing. And although it is not among the ten most common, it can already be classified as one.

1. Turkish language belongs to the southwestern subgroup of Turkic languages. Knowing it, you can understand other Turkic dialects: Azerbaijani, Tatar, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Bashkir, Yakut and many other languages. Accordingly, their study is simplified. At the same time, Turkish is used by 40% of the Turkic-speaking inhabitants of the Earth, which makes this language the most common in this subgroup.

2. According to various estimates, Turkish is spoken by about 73-77 million people around the world. Of these, about 60 million live in Turkey. A lot of Turks live in the USA, Canada, Australia and Western and Eastern European countries. There are especially many of them in Germany - more than 2 million people.

3. The Turkish language has a large number of dialects, some of them are quite different from each other. Residents of different regions are not immediately able to understand each other. The basis for literary Turkish is the Istanbul dialect.

4. It is believed that the literary Turkish language began to take shape in the 15th century, based on the dialects of the inhabitants of the Anatolian Peninsula. Subsequently, a huge number of borrowings from Persian appeared in it. According to some data, by the beginning of the 19th century, about 80% of all Turkish words were of foreign origin. That is, the language spoken in the Ottoman Empire was, in fact, just a mixture of three languages, among which Turkish played far from the most significant role.

5. The Ottoman Empire used Arabic writing, borrowed back in the 10th century. It was not very suitable for the Turkish language, which made the writing process awkward and difficult to learn, resulting in a huge number of illiterates. In 1922, after the formation of the Turkish Republic, a deep reform of the Turkish language began. First of all, the Latin alphabet was adopted, which simplified the writing process and significantly increased literacy among all segments of the population. At the same time, the Turks abandoned the letters Q, W and X, which they simply did not need.

6. Also, as part of the language reform, a struggle began with words of foreign origin, which actually continues to this day. Turks today are reluctant to borrow foreign words, preferring to replace them with their own analogues. For example, instead of the word "computer" they use "bilgisayar", which literally means "information processor".

7. For successful implementation reforms Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Turkish Republic, founded the Turkish Language Association (TDK) in 1932. And her activities were extremely successful. In fact, TDK created a new language by developing a large number of neologisms. As a result, for a long time the language of the old people was simply incomprehensible to the youth, who were already learning according to completely new rules and standards.

8. The Turkish language is interesting because of the almost complete absence of exceptions to grammatical rules. At the same time, it is phonetic, words are read the same way as they are written. Nouns have no gender, and verbs do not change endings depending on gender. Words in a sentence always have a strictly defined position. This, as well as some other factors, significantly simplifies the learning process.

9. However, you should not think that Turkish is an easy language. The fact is that some of its grammatical features are truly exotic from the point of view of a European. Thus, Turkish is an agglutinative language, when various affixes and suffixes are added to a word, as a result of which it changes its grammatical forms. As a result, the resulting result can replace an entire sentence. All this is very unusual for a speaker of an inflected language, like or.

10. Agglutinative languages ​​are a godsend for those who like to compose long words. Turkish is no exception. For some time it was believed that the longest word in it was "Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınız", a 44-letter nonsense meaning literally “you are also one of those people whom we cannot make residents of Czechoslovakia”. Subsequently, lovers of word games were able to create a more effective "Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine" 70 letters. It can be translated as follows "Like you're one of the ones we can't make into a loser maker.". Such exercises have no practical significance, but they well illustrate the features of the language.

When going on a beach or sightseeing holiday to popular Turkey, Russian tourists have not thought about communication problems for a long time. Despite the fact that the official language in Turkey is Turkish, local residents at the resorts have not only mastered English and German, but also speak Russian quite well.

Some statistics and facts

• Despite the significant number of languages ​​represented in Turkey, at least 80% of its population or 60 million people speak only Turkish.
• The remaining 20% ​​of the country's residents communicate in almost fifty dialects and dialects, with North Kurdish being recognized as the most popular among them.
• Only 17% of the population speak English, but this is quite enough to run a tourism business for a sufficiently long time. high level.
• Every hundredth Turk speaks Russian.
• Turkish is also widely spoken in the northern part of the island of Cyprus, where more than 170 thousand inhabitants consider it their native language.

Turkish: history and modernity

Turks are very sensitive to their own state language. In Turkey, according to the Constitution, only Turkish can be used for education in schools and universities, and foreign languages ​​are studied in accordance with the rules established by the state.
Turkish belongs to the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family. Experts consider the language of the Gagauz, living in Moldova and Romania, to be the closest lexically and phonetically to Turkish. It is somewhat similar to Turkish and Azerbaijani, and in Turkmen linguists find some phonetic and grammatical similarities. Among all the diverse Turkish dialects as a basis literary language The Istanbul version was adopted.
Over the past couple of centuries, Turkish has been heavily influenced by Persian and Arabic, and as a result has received a large number of loanwords. In the first third of the twentieth century, the Turks began to fight for the purity of the language, and the process of clearing it of foreign words continues to this day. It’s curious, but Turkish also has borrowings from Russian, for example the word “şapka” sounds almost Russian and means a headdress.

Note to tourists

In areas far from the resort areas of Turkey, few people know English and Russian, and therefore for independent travel It’s worth stocking up on a Russian-Turkish phrasebook. In the same places where the main tourist routes are laid, menus in restaurants, maps and other information important for the traveler are guaranteed to be translated into English, and often into Russian.

Turkish language

General information about the Turkish language

Turkish language(Türk dili, Türkçe) - the official language of Turkey, belonging to the southwestern (or western Oghuz) subgroup of Turkic languages

Turkish language is the official language of the Turkish Republic

Countries where Turkish has official status

Türkiye, Republic of Cyprus, Turkish Republic Northern Cyprus

Countries where Turkish has the status of a regional language

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Iraq, Romania

Countries where Turkish is spoken

Turkey, Germany, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Cyprus, Northern Cyprus, Greece, Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Romania

To a lesser extent, the Turkish language is widespread in Iraq, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, Hungary, Serbia, Syria, Jordan, Australia, Great Britain, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada , Liechtenstein, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Belgium, Austria, France, the Netherlands, USA

Turkish is the native language of Meskhetian Turks living in Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey, USA, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan

Languages ​​closest to Turkish

The closest to Turkish in lexical, phonetic and syntactic terms are the Balkan-Turkic dialect of the Gagauz, widespread in the territory of modern Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria, and the southern dialect of the Crimean Tatar language. The Azerbaijani and Turkmen languages ​​are somewhat further apart

Dialects of Turkish

There are many dialects of the Turkish language; the basis of the Turkish literary language today is the Istanbul dialect. In addition, the Turkish language has a number of other dialects

In total, 88 million people speak Turkish in the world.

History of the Turkish language

Modern Turkish language comes from the Oghuz language - the language of the eastern Turkic tribes that once inhabited Central Asia and settled the Anatolian Peninsula by the 11th-13th centuries.

The literary Turkish language began to take shape at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries on the basis of the Old Anatolian-Turkic language, which, in turn, goes back to the Central Asian-Turkic language, brought to Asia Minor by the Seljuks and greatly diluted with elements of the colloquial language of the mixed Turkic population of Anatolia

Over the past few centuries, the Turkish language has been significantly influenced by Persian and Arabic, and therefore the number of words borrowed from these languages ​​has at times reached 80% of the Turkish vocabulary

Until the 20th century, there was a literary language of the Ottoman Empire, which was quite different from colloquial Turkish speech - the Ottoman language

Pan-Turkists at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. published magazines and newspapers in a language that was gradually cleared of borrowings, although different from the modern Turkish language. New language propagated by the Young Turks

Turkish language reform

Until 1928, the Turkish alphabet consisted of letters from the Perso-Arabic script. In 1928, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in order to modernize Turkey, replaced Arabic letters with Latin ones with minor changes

Today the Arabic alphabet is practically not used

In the 30s last century, the process of replacing foreign borrowings with native Turkish words began. This process continues today, although in the Turkish language one can still find words of Persian-Arabic origin along with their synonyms constructed from Turkic roots

In the 20th century, new concepts appeared from European languages, primarily from French

For the re-Turkization and modernization of the Turkish language, the still active state “Turkish Linguistic Society” (“Türk Dil Kurumu”) was created in 1932.

The principle that guides the Society in its activities is purism (arıtçılık), that is, the concept according to which the Turkish language should be cleared of foreign borrowings

One of the most important steps On the path of democratization of Turkey there were alphabet reform (in the fourth year of the Turkish Republic) and language reform (in the ninth year of the Turkish Republic)

Language reform is an activity to develop the Turkish language as capable of independently serving science, technology and art.

Briefly about the Turkish language

The Turkish language, like all Turkic languages, according to morphological typology, belongs to agglutinative languages, in which the leading method of word formation and inflection is affixation, i.e. adding special affixes to the root or stem of a word in a strictly defined order

The vocabulary of the Turkish literary language consists of two large sections: words of Turkic root and borrowed words

Borrowed words by source of borrowing are represented by Arabic, Persian, Italian, Greek, French, German, English, Russian and other languages