Turkish

Turkish (Türkçe), the westernmost of the Turkic languages, belongs to the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family. Turkey, by land mass, is positioned 95% in Asia and 5% in Europe. Thus, this article “Turkish Language in India” is part of Asian languages and not European languages in India.

The oldest written records are found upon stone monuments in Central Asia, in the Orhon, Yenisey and Talas regions within the boundaries of present-day Mongolia. They are the eighth century AD Orkhon inscriptions by the Göktürks, recording the Old Turkic language, which were discovered in 1889 in the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia.

When the Turkish spoken in Turkey is considered in a historical context, it can be classified according to three distinct periods:

• Old Anatolian Türkiye (old Ottoman – between the 13th and the 15th centuries) 
• Ottoman Türkiye (from the 16th to the 19th century) 
• 20th century Modern Türkiye

It has a number of dialects such as Danubian, Dinler, Edirne, Eskisehir, Gaziantep, Karamanli, Razgrad, Rumelian, Urfa. Modern Standard Turkish is based on the variety spoken in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city.

Turkish-speaking population of the world

It is the official language of Turkey and one of the official languages of Cyprus. It is spoken as a native language by over 80 million people worldwide.

Other than Turkey and Northern Cyprus, there are sizable populations of Turkish speakers in Macedonia, Kosovo, and most countries bordering Turkey, such as Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Albania, Iran, Syria, Iraq and other parts of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and in the Caucasus. Most of these countries were part of the territory formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire