Turkish is the main member of the Turkic language family, which itself is subfamily of the Ural-Altaic language family. Throughout history, the Anatolian peninsula has been a crossroads for the intersection of empires and cultures. Due to the prominence of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish (or a Turkic language) is still spoken today (although commonly not as a national language) in many of the areas previously governed by the Ottoman Turks. However, besides in Turkey, Turkish is also the (co)official language in Cyprus. Modern Turkish is a descendent of Ottoman Turkish, which itself developed from the Old Anatolian Turkish introduced to Anatolia by the Seljuk Turks shortly before the 12th century AD. Around this time, Turkish absorbed a great number of Arabic and Persian words. Indeed, until 1928, Turkish was written in the Arabic script.
Modern Turkey (the country) was founded in 1923. Along with its founding came the motivation (stemming mostly from Kemal Atatürk, the founder) to westernize. In 1928, the Turkish republican government replaced the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet. This transformed Turkish, purging many of the foreign elements from the language and creating a “new literary language”. However, there are still many indications of the past relationship between Turkish and Arabic. Around 30% of the Turkish vocabulary is composed of Arabic words written in the Latin Alphabet. For example, in Arabic, the pronunciation to say hello is /mar.ħa.ban/, while in Turkish this is simply “Merhaba”. This occurs frequently throughout the Turkish language and is indicative of the strong past relationship between the two languages, despite Arabic being a Semitic language.
While the realization that Modern Turkish developed mainly in an attempt to westernize, this puts into context many of the challenges facing Turkey today, the most obvious being Turkey’s desire to join the European Union. With the founding of Turkey so relatively recent, national pride is obvious. One example of this is the creation of the Turkish Language Institute in 1932, which not only established basis for “correct” Turkish but also seeks to ensure Turkish as a language develops naturally and free from foreign influences.
Years ago, there was some consternation regarding whether Turkish belonged to a purely Altaic language family, or whether it was in fact in the same family as Hungarian and Finnish. This difficulty stems from the challenge in piecing together a single, mother language from the scattered remnants of the language that exist in out current languages today. From what I gather, linguists have discredited the existence of the Altaic family, opting instead for the Ural-Altaic family. However, within this family, one can differentiate between the Ural languages and the Altaic ones.
Comments