Interesting facts about the Turkish language
Turkish
is the official language in Turkey with
a population of over 72 million and also in the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
Turkish is spoken by small groups of ethnic Turks in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of
Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania and some other regions of Eastern Europe. Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria,
Switzerland and France also have large Turkish immigrant
communities, the most populous Turkish community being in Germany. In Azerbaijan and in some ex-Soviet republics Turkish is
spoken too.
Although
Turkish was previously written using the Arabic script, it now makes use of the
Western Latin alphabet. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, after founding modern Turkey,
made the conversion into Latin script, although some letters were omitted or
exchanged for different letters.
This
similarity to European languages might make it a bit easier to learn, yet there are enough differences to indicate that Turkish
has had a very distinctive history of its own. The absence of feminine or
masculine forms of nouns and adjectives in Turkish also makes life easier for
learners. But just like in French, you has two forms, the informal and formal.
The verbs – which always come at the end of sentences - require suffixes
according to the level of formality you choose when speaking. Suffixes in
Turkish may well cause difficulty at first, but once you’ve got your head
around the logic of conjugations, you’ll see that it’s not impossible to figure
out all verbal conjugations.