10 Fascinating Facts You Didn't Know

About the Turkish Language

Turkish Language House

02 April, 2019

Pop quiz. Which of these statements is true?

A) More people speak Turkish than Italian and Greek combined

B) The Turkish language is spoken natively in 2 continents but only one country

B) The U.S. Government recently labelled Turkish a critical language

D) Turkish is the most interesting language on earth. ever.

If you answered "all of the above", then congratulations! You get today's
Turkish scholar award!

(disclaimer: The Turkish Scholar award does not actually exist).

When most people want to learn a new language, they usually default to all of
the popular, boring options like Spanish, French, or German.

But here's the thing.

You're not a boring person.

And because we know you're not a boring person, we're going to look at 10
fascinating facts about one of the most unique languages on the planet. We
promise you're going to learn some surprisingly useful things about the Turkish
language and you'll have fun along the way.

1. Turkish is spoken natively in 2 continents, but only one

country

Prepare yourself, because this first fact might blow your mind a little bit.

Turkey is one of the only countries that are located on two different
continents. If you visit Istanbul, you'll notice pretty quickly that there's an
enormous, 20-mile-long straight that divides the city in half.
Here's where things get crazy.

On the west side of this straight, the city is officially part of Europe. However,
when you cross one of the three bridges to the other side of the city, you're
now standing in Asia.

Linguistically, this means that Turkish is spoken as a native language in both

Europe and Asia, but it's actually only one country.

What's even more amazing is that Turkey isn't just located on two continents,
but it's actually the only place on the planet where 3 different continents
meet (Africa, Asia, Europe). So when we say that it's located in the center of
the world, you can understand why.

2. Turkish is more “Turkish” than it used to be

We'll have to start this one with a quick history lesson.

Back in the days of the Ottoman empire, (when people dressed like the guy on
the right) the Turkish language was a melting pot of Turkish, Arabic, and Farsi.

In fact, before 1932, only 35-40% of Turkish words actually had a Turkish

origin.
Well around this time, a lot of things were happening around Turkey. It had
recently become a republic, there were massive political, economic, and social
reforms going on, and something called the Turkish Language Association was
being formed.

One of the main goals of the Turkish Language Association was to try and
“purify” the language. In other words, they were trying to remove all of the
words with foreign origins and they were essentially creating a completely new
language in the process.

Because of their efforts, almost 80% of Turkish words now have a “pure”

Turkish origin. Interestingly, a lot of words in Turkish actually have 2-3
additional words which can be used because of the "old Turkish" vocabulary
that has survived.

3. The US government has named Turkish as one of the

most important languages on the planet

The United States Bureau of Educational and Cultural affairs recently named
Turkish a critical language.

What exactly does this mean? It means the United States government
thinks Turkish is one of the most important languages on the planet for people
to learn.

(I told you we weren't exaggerating about it being a super cool language)

You might be asking yourself "Why is Turkish so important?"

Great question.

We actually wrote an entire blog post about this exact topic that you can read
more about here

4. Unbelievable tongue twisters

If you want to sound really cool around your Turkish friends, then you're in
luck. This is one of the coolest tongue twisters you will find in any language.

"Bir berber bir berbere gel berber beraber Berberistan’da bir berber dükkanı
açalım demiş."

The saying basically means "A barber told another barber “Come barber, let’s
start up a joint barbershop in Barberistan”.

It's also super helpful to know if you ever have a barber who wants to start a
barbershop in Barberistan.
5. Turkish suffixes are like transformers

This is going to sound a little crazy for our English speakers out there, so
buckle up.

Basically, the Turkish language likes to add suffixes instead of using different
words (we'll talk more about this in a minute).

Now here's the crazy part.

When a suffix is added onto a word, all of the vowels (and sometimes even the
consonants) magically transform to match each other. In other words, there is
a set of rules in Turkish called "vowel harmony" that make suffixes "match" the
word that they're attached to.

If your brain just got microwaved, we get it. This is not easy stuff.

The good news is that even though this sounds really intimidating to foreigners
trying to learn the language, it actually makes a lot of sense. For example, if
the last vowel in a word is an "e", then the suffix you are going to use will have
an "e". If the last vowel in a word is an "a" then the suffix takes an.... that's
right, an "a".

If you're a visual person, it looks something like this:

Ev= House

Adam= Man
To saw "to/towards" something in Turkish, you add a simple little "-e/a"
on to the word you're going to. This means that the phrases "to the
house and to the man" look like this:

Eve (ev+e)

Adama (adam+a)

Not too bad right?

In all fairness, it's actually a little more complex than that because there are
"families" of letters that are matched together, but you get the idea.

6. Turkish completely changed its alphabet in 1928

Remember that Turkish Language Association we mentioned earlier?

Well these guys stayed busy. (like, REALLY busy).

Basically, this guy named Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (who is pretty much a
political superhero in Turkey) founded the Turkish republic and became
president after the collapse of the Ottoman empire.

He was making some massive reforms throughout the country by furthering

women's rights, introducing western legal codes, creating a secular
government, and being an all around awesome guy.
One of his main goals at this time was to completely overhaul the Turkish
language, which is why our friends at the Turkish Language Association stayed
so busy.

A major part of this transformation was done through changing the entire
alphabet from Arabic script to a westernized latin script.

This means that if you are a westerner learning Turkish, you can thank dear
'ole Ataturk that the alphabet doesn't look something like this:

7. You already know some Turkish words

Here's a fun little game. I'm going to write a few sentences in English, but
randomly change a few of the words to Turkish. Let's see how many of them
you can understand.

I'm so hungry I could eat an entire bucket of kebab.

Ready to watch Fast and Furious 16? Let's go buy our tickets at the kiosk.

You free this weekend? Let's head down to the lake with our awesome
new kayak.

See what I did there? The point is that there are some English words
like yogurt, tulip, pastrami, kebab, kayak, baklava, and kiosk that are loan words
from Turkish.

What's even better for foreigners learning Turkish is that this works the other
way too. Turkish has dozens of loan words from
English like kahve (coffee), televizyon (tv), and restoran (restaurant).

8. More people speak Turkish than Italian and Greek

combined
This one is going to blow some people's minds.
According to Boston University, there are 60 million native Turkish speakers
throughout the world, and 15 million more who speak it as a second language.
So altogether that are over 75 million people on the planet who know Turkish.

We're not mathematicians here at the Turkish Language House, but we're
pretty sure 75 million is a lot of people.

To try and put those numbers in perspective, there are more Turkish speakers
in the world than there are residents living in New York (state), Colorado,
Indiana, Tennessee, Wyoming, Maine, Alabama, Nebraska, Missouri, Montana,
Idaho, Oklahoma, North Dakota, West Virginia, Minnesota, and
Wisconsin COMBINED.

Just for the fun of it, here's what those numbers look like as European
countries. That's right- entire countries.

You would have to combine the entire populations of Denmark, Belgium,

Finland, Croatia, Greece, Sweden, Ireland, Moldova, Norway, Switzerland, and
Austria to reach 75 million people.

I think you get the point. There's a lot of people speaking Turkish out there.

9. Agglutination, Agglutination, Agglutination!

We know what you're thinking.

"What in the heck is agglutination?"

It's a fair question. It kind of sounds like something my elementary school
teacher would have written on a discipline report. "David was using a lot
of agglutination in class and unfortunately had to be sent to the principle's
office."

Agglutination is just a fancy term meaning that a language uses special suffixes
rather than separate words.

For example, if I wanted to say something like "I will be able to catch a bus",
you could pull this sentence off in Turkish with only two words by saying
"Otobus yakalabileceğim".

So how does this work?

Well if you break down that big, nasty word that starts with a "y", you'll see
that it's actually a root word with a ton of endings added on.

The main part of the verb is "yakala-" meaning "to catch" and we added "-
abil+ecek+im" to communicate ability, future tense, and who was doing the
action.

It looks pretty intimidating, but that's why God gave us so many brain cells.

10. Muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebile-

ceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine

Remember how we were just talking about how much the Turkish language
loves suffixes? Well it's time to take off the training wheels because the
longest word in Turkish has 17 suffixes in it (although to be honest, we got
tired of counting around 15 so it might be even more).

If you take an even deeper look at it, this word has over 70 letters and means
something like “As though you are from those whom we may not be able to
easily make into a maker of unsuccessful ones”

This doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but if we're honest, the only
reason you would ever want to learn this word would be to impress friends
anyways.