1. Turkish language combines Altaic, Indo-European and Semitic languages.
It’s well known that English is praised with combining Latin and Germanic languages, two languages in the same family. Turkish is far superior in this, Turkish has grammatical structures from three different language families that are Altaic(Turkish), Semitic(Arabic) and Indo-European(Persian).
2. Turkish language was written in a dozen of writing systems
Turkish language was written in Orkhon, Manichean, Sogdian, Uighur, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Cyrilic, Latin alphabets. Most classical texts are in Arabic, in the literary period. In contemporary times Latin alphabet is popular among Turkic languages and some Turkic dialects still use Cyrillic.
3. Turkish language has vowel harmony
The vowel harmony system in Turkish follows a specified pattern in each word. This pattern is based on the front(e, i, ö, ü) and back(a,ı,o,u) vowels.Vowels in a word are brought together to preserve uniformity in frontness or backness. Examples: Kapı, Çekim, Odun, Kirli. Another interestig fact is Turkish being rich in vowels, there aren’t any double consonants in the roots of the Turkish words, so it’s usually one vowel+one consonant in Turkish words. Furthermore, Turkish suffixes are adaptable. When you add a suffix to a word, it changes depending on the sound combinations of the word to which it is attached. For example, the plural suffix -lAr appears as ler or lar depending on the noun to which it is connected. It is pronounced ler following the vowels e, i, u, and o. It occurs as -lar following the other vowels (a, o, and u), as in masa-lar.
4. Turkish is agglunative
Turkish has agglutinative structure, which involves adding suffixes to a basic root to generate words. This feature enables the building of complicated words by combining numerous suffixes. For example to say “I couldn’t succeed” you just combine suffixes and build “başaramadım.”
5. Turkish the most spoken non-European language in Europe
The most spoken non-native, non-European language in Europe is Turkish. Turkish has a significant presence in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, France, and Belgium due to historical and migratory factors. Large Turkish-speaking communities have established themselves in these countries, resulting in Turkish being widely spoken as a non-native language in Europe.
6. Turkish language evolves backwards and forwards at the same time
It’s relative and needs a framework to decide what is backward or forward, though Turkish language may be leading in both directions. Most languages start with pure grounds and bonds with other languages increasingly; Turkish language became an object of linguistic ideology of Turkish Republic in 1930’s and started a purism, archaising and resusitation of ancient Turkic words and purgigng of Arabic and Persian loanwords. Turkish Republic never prevented western loanwords though. Thats backwards and forwards. Although, See Geoffrey Lewis’s book, Catasthrophic Success, explains it.
7. Turkish is the largest branch in Altaic Language Family
The largest speaker group of Altaic language family, Turkish language has 90 million speakers World-wide. Tuvan, Uzbek, and Manchu. Some researchers think Japaneese and Korean are also in the Altaic family. Regardless of the theory Turkish language has settled into Europe and Asia and became a bridge between two hemispheres.
8. Turkish has Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) Word Order
Turkish has a subject-object-verb word order, which means that the subject of a sentence typically comes before the object and then the verb. For example, “Bugün(today) okula(to school) gittim(I went).”
9. Turkish language doesn’t have grammatical gender
The language has no gender-specific pronouns or articles. In terms of grammatical structure, this renders Turkish a gender-neutral language.
10. Turkish language is pronounced as written
A subtle language in phonetics with eight vowel sounds and 21 consonant sounds. In general, each letter of the Turkish script corresponds to a single sound, making pronunciation more constant when compared to other languages.
11. At least 20 Thousand words were loaned from Turkish to other languages
According to Dr. Günay Karaağaç, Turkish has given more than 20 thousand words to many neighboring countries due to being the imperial language. Serbian 9000 Armenian 4260 Bulgarian 3500 Persian 3000 Romanian 3000 Albanian 3000 Greek 3000 Russian 2500 Arabic 2000 Hungarian 2000 Ukrainian 800 English 470 Chinese 300 Czech 248 Urdu 227 German 166 Italian 146.
12. Turkish language assets
Much of the vocabulary and proverbs come from Nomadic culture due to settling late in comparison to other cultures. The grammar is also a nomadic one, rich in vovewls and being agglunative; furthermore the stress being at the end of the sentence could only remind us nomadic warriors of the steppes. The heritage of Turkish includes an imperial one as well. Having been the commanding language over the Middle East for centuries, many idioms and cultural contexts are produced in Turkish.
13. Turkish syntax is flexible
Subjects and/or objects may be dropped. If you want to express “I’m old” You can say it with one word with suffixes such as “yaşlıyım” or you can either say “Ben mutluyum”, The subject is indicated via a suffix on the verb. Secondly, You can change the order of words in a sentence in various ways. In English you can’t say “Going I school” but it’s perfectly sensible in Turkish.
| Subject-Object-Verb | Ben okula gidiyorum. | “I’m going to school.” |
| Subject-Verb-Object | Ben gidiyorum okula. | “I’m going to school.” |
| Object-Subject-Verb | Okula ben gidiyorum. | “I’m going to school.” |
| Object-Verb-Subject | Okula gidiyorum ben. | “I’m going to school.” |
| Verb-Subject-Object | Gidiyorum okula ben. | “I’m going to school.” |
| Verb-Object-Subject | Gidiyorum ben okula. | “I’m going to school.” |