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5 Interesting Facts About The Turkish Language

Updated: Sep 13, 2019

The Turkish language has around 75 million native speakers. They are mainly found in Turkey and the surrounding states. Turkey is believed to be the home to some of the earliest advanced civilizations in the entire human history. Also, Turkish has several dialects. Which include the Western dialects and Eastern dialects. Of the main Turkish dialects is the Danubian which appears to be the only member of the Western group. However, the following dialects are of the Eastern group: Eskisehir, Karamanli, Razgrad, Gaziantep, Dinler, Rumelian, Edirne, and Urfa. Turkish language history is divided into three major groups. The groups include old Turkish, mid-Turkish and the new-Turkish. Turkish is spoken natively in two continents (but only one country).


1. Turkish is spoken natively in two continents (but only one country).

The largest Turkish-speaking city in Turkey is the capital, Istanbul has a population of 14 million. Istanbul is a unique city; it is in one country but two different continents. Half of it is in Asia, while the other half is in Europe.


2. Turkish has had substantial influence by Arabic, Farsi, and French.

As a result of its geographical location, Turkish has been influenced by the Farsi and Arabic, two languages are spoken in countries that border Turkey. Also, Turkish has borrowed significantly from French, especially with words relating to finance and economy. For example, döviz (“currency”) comes from the French device; kriz (“crisis”) comes from the French crise;.


3. Turkish Vowel system.

Turkish is an agglutinative language, and it has a lot of prefixes and suffixes. Turkish also has two classes of vowels: a, ı, o, and u are hard vowels, whereas e, i, ö, and ü are soft vowels. The Vowel harmony means that suffixes will use either hard or soft vowels depending on the final vowel in the root word. For example, if the last vowel in a word is soft, then the vowels in the suffixes will also be soft to conserve this harmony.


4. Many English words are of Turkish origin.

It goes without a saying that some of the English words we use in the modern day are Turkish. For instance, the most common words we use in English and are Turkish include kiosk, yogurt, kayak.


5. Turkish often uses long words.

The widespread use of affixes has always given rise to long words. On a light note, it is said that the longest Turkish word is Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınız. This means that; “You are said to be one of those that we couldn’t manage to convert to a Czechoslovak”.



Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul


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