Local name:	Türkçe
Language family:	Turkic > Southwestern (Oghuz) > Western Oghuz
Native speakers:	~ 51 million (Ethnologue.com, 1987)
Script:	A modified version of the Latin alphabet
Official in:	Turkey, Cyprus
Spoken mostly in:	Turkey, Germany, Bulgaria, Cyprus

The 1920s was a dynamic time: Turkey was created out of the remainders of the Ottoman Empire, and Ottoman Turkish was quickly and thoroughly transformed into modern Turkish. Whereas Ottoman Turkish was written with the Arabic script, a new modified version of the Latin alphabet was invented for modern Turkish. The vocabulary which heavily rested on Arabic and Persian loanwords was partly exchanged. When possible, Turkic words used by the uneducated classes would be raised to standard, but a special language committe also developed a big number of neologisms, mostly from older Turkic words, like uçak (airplane) from the verb uçmak (to fly).

Turkish is an agglutinative language. Endings are ‘glued’ onto the root. A phrase like ‘in my houses’ will be translated with one word: evlerimde where ev means ‘house’, -ler is the plural ending, -im is the equivalent of ‘my’, and -de is the locative ending. Since Turkish uses vowel harmony, the vowels in these endings might change depending on the vowels in the root.

Turkey Standard: “Kuzey rüzgarı ve Güneş”
Speaker: Özlem Age at recording: 29 (2009) Geographical reference: İstanbul, TR (Google Map)


Kuzey rüzgarı ve Güneş hangimiz daha güçlü diye tartışıyorlarmış.
Tam o sırada kalın paltolu bir yolcu çıkagelmiş.
Kim yolcunun paltosunu çıkartmasına ilk önce neden olursa, onun diğerinden daha güçlü olduğunun kanıtlanacağına karar vermişler.
Kuzey Rüzgarı olabildiğince esmiş, ama o estikçe yolcu paltosuna daha çok sarınmış.
En sonunda Kuzey Rüzgarı vazgeçmiş.
Güneş sıcak sıcak parlamaya başlamış, ve yolcu hemen paltosunu çıkarıvermiş.
Böylece Kuzey Rüzgarı, Güneşin daha güçlü olduğunu itiraf etmek zorunda kalmış.