Turkish (Türk dili) is a member of
Turkic family of
languages, often considered a subclass of the
Altaic languages. Thus
Mongolian is possibly related to Turkish. Although the languages of other Turkic countries (former
Soviet republics) are quite similar to Turkish (especially those of
Azerbaijan and
Turkmenistan), there are many major differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.
The Turkish used in countries such as
Bulgaria,
Greece,
Cyprus, the
Republic of Macedonia,
Romania and
Uzbekistan is also called
Osmanli.
The characteristic features of Turkish are the vowel harmony (if the first vowel of a Turkish word is a front vowel, the second and other vowels of the same word are usually the same vowel or another front vowel; e.g. Erdem), the abundance of suffixes (and very few prefixes), and a word order that is the opposite of that in English and other Indo-European languages). Turkish, like Finnish and Hungarian, is an agglutinative language.
See also: Turkish alphabet
External links
