Turkish Language Courses

With approximately 75 million speakers worldwide, Turkish is a popular language to learn given its pivotal role between the Middle East and Europe. 90% of Turkish speakers are in Turkey and the rest are spread over some 35 countries including Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Macedonia, Romania and Uzbekistan. Turkish is part of the Turkish family of languages, which also includes Gagauz, and Khorasani and Osmanli Turkish.

Turkey is often referred to as a ‘bridge between the West and the East’. This is illustrated on the streets of Istanbul by the great variety in dress. Men in traditional Islamic skull caps, or in t-shirts and jeans, and women with headscarves, or in miniskirts and high-heeled shoes. Turkey presents a fascinating mix of East meets West and will continue to have geographical strategic importance in the modern world.

Agglutination refers to the process of adding suffixes to a root word, so that a single word can convey what English would take a complete sentence to say. For example, the English sentence “They were not coming” is a single word in Turkish: Gelmiyorlard.  The regularity and predictability in Turkish of how these suffixes are added make agglutination easier to learn than you might think.

Turkish has ‘post-positions’ rather than prepositions, and objects usually come before the verb.  So the sentence “Ahmet talked about his class” would have the following word order in Turkish: “Ahmet his class about talked.” While this may seem strange at first, you’ll be surprised how quickly this new word order comes to feel natural when you’re learning Turkish.