Turkish

Turkish

The Turkish language belongs to the Turkic subfamily of the Altaic language family. About 100 million people from Bulgaria to China speak Turkic languages, some of which are mutually intelligible with the language spoken in Turkey. According to UNESCO, Turkish is the eleventh most spoken language in the world.

When Turks from Asia penetrated Iran they adopted the Arabic script and their language was enriched with large amounts of Arabic and Persian vocabulary. During the Ottoman Empire Turkish continued to incorporate more foreign words, making the language richer still.  

In the early 1920s, the first leader of the Republic of Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, implemented a number of reforms aimed at purifying and modernizing Turkish, including adopting the Latin alphabet and purging many Arabic and Persian words from the language. Today Turkish is in constant evolution and regularly incorporates new words. 

Turkish is an agglutinative language, i.e. words are formed from roots and any number of morphological particles (suffixes affixes). Its writing system is almost entirely phonetic.