The Turkish Language in a Nutshell
Turkish belongs to the Ural-Altaic family of languages of Asia and is spoken by over 65 million people. Modern Turkish spoken in Turkey shares many similarities with Azeri, Uyghur, Kazakh and Uzbek.
During the Ottoman Empire, Turkish was written using the Arabic script. After the First World War when the Ottoman Empire was defeated as an ally of Germany, the Republic of Turkey arose from the ashes of the Empire. The leader of Turkey who guided this remarkable transformation, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, implemented linguistic reforms in addition to social and political reforms. In 1928, a new Latin alphabet, containing special Turkish characters, was adopted.
The Turkish alphabet has 29 letters. Turkish does not contain q, x, and w but has the following: Şş, Çç, Üü, Öö, Ğğ, Iı and İi.
Features of Turkish
- Turkish is an agglutinative language, adding syllables to root words
- Turkish nouns do not have different genders as in French or German
- Turkish grammar is very complex but regular
- Turkish is phonetic where each letter is assigned a specific sound
- Turkish syntax is very different than English with the verb usually at the end of the sentence
- Turkish has vowel harmony, which is unknown in English
What does this mean for translations?
Turkish is an agglutinative language, where root words take on many suffixes to indicate tense, case, etc. For instance: “Gidiyorum” means “I am going” in English. That’s 3 English words to one Turkish word! Plus, Turkish does not contain articles such as “a,” “an,” and “the.” Thus, when translating from English into Turkish, word count will shrink anywhere from 5-25%.
When translating from Turkish into English, word count will expand consistently around 30%.