Turkish is in the Altay branch of the Ural-Altaic linguistic family, which is in the same linguistic family as languages as Finnish and Hungarian. Other languages in the Altay branch include Tatar, Kazakh, and Dolgan. Turkish can be further classified to the South-West/Oghuz group. Other members of the Oghuz group include Azerbaijani (Western), Gaguaz (Western), and Turkmen (Eastern).
Turkish used to be written in the Perso-Arabic alphabet until the language was replaced with Latin alphabet, as a part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's reforms in the 1920s. There were a lot of Arabic and Persian vocabulary in the language, with traces of grammatical influences. Arabic, French, and Persian provided many loanwords to Ottoman Turkish, before the words were officially related with Turkish counterparts. For example: the word for south in Arabic is جنوب cenûb, which was adopted into cenup in Ottoman Turkish, but now is güney. Another word is cloth, which is البسه elbise* in Arabic, which was adopted into elbise in Ottoman Turkish, but is now giysi, in modern-day Turkish. Many loanwords in French still are used in modern-day Turkish. The word for solution is also solution in French, which was adapted into solüsyon, but now çözelti. Status in English, is statut in French, which was adapted to statü, but now durum.
During the reform, these Arabic / Persian loanwords were replaced with new derivations of Turkic roots, which created a generational divide between the youth and elderly at the time of its' implementation. In recent years, the Turkish Language Association (TDK) are still coming up with new words and concepts, mostly derived from the English language, which is really interesting to me that there is still an active association establishing these things. Knowing that Turkish has gone through these changes, it gives me an insight on the roots of the language and culture, which was influenced by so many different languages/cultures from different regions.
Languages evolve over time and adapt based on the changes of the surrounding world. As shown in Turkish, there are cultural and outer influences from other places/languages, but there are also internal changes where the TDK and the Atatürk reforms initiate some form of change.
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