Learn Turkish

Türkçe

Turkic → Oghuz

88 million speakers

Latin script

Turkey, Cyprus

Turkish is the most widely spoken Turkic language and the official language of Turkey and Cyprus. The Oghuz Turks migrated into Anatolia in the 11th century under the Seljuk dynasty, and Turkish became the prestige language of the Ottoman Empire across six centuries. Its 29-letter Latin alphabet — introduced by Atatürk in 1928 — replaced the Arabic script overnight. Turkish is highly agglutinative: the single word "evlerinizden" (from your houses) packs five grammatical layers into one unbroken word.

Language Facts

FamilyTurkic → Oghuz

Native speakers88 million

Writing systemLatin alphabet (29 letters)

CountriesTurkey, Cyprus

Learning Tips

→Master vowel harmony first — every suffix must match the root vowel in front/back and rounded/unrounded quality
→No grammatical gender and no articles — two major hurdles English learners never have to face
→Word order is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV); the verb always closes the sentence or clause
→Once you know Turkish, Azerbaijani is immediately accessible and Uzbek becomes much easier