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Turkish is a Turkic language and a member of the proposed Altaic language family, which tentatively includes Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian. It is spoken predominantly in Turkey, with smaller communities of speakers in Cyprus, Greece, and Eastern Europe, as well as by several million immigrants in Western Europe. Turkish is the most widely spoken Turkic language, with 65–73 million native speakers worldwide.

The roots of the language can be traced to Central Asia, with the first written records dating back nearly 1,200 years. To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkish—the immediate precursor of today's Turkish—spread as the Ottoman Empire expanded. In 1928, as one of Atatürk's Reforms in the early years of the new Turkish Republic, the Ottoman script was replaced with a phonetic variant of the Latin alphabet. Concurrently, the newly founded Turkish Language Association initiated a drive to reform the language by removing foreign loanwords in favor of native variants and coinages from Turkic roots.

The distinctive characteristics of Turkish are vowel harmony, extensive agglutination, Subject Object Verb word order, and lack of grammatical gender. (more...)