Deciphering the History and Dialects of Turkish

Turkish is one of the most ancient languages, and recent studies demonstrate that it dates as far back as 5500 years ago. It belongs to the Altaic language family and therefore it is closely related to the Tungusic languages, Mongolian, Korean and perhaps Japanese. In addition to that, it is the sixth most widely spoken language in the world. The westernmost tongue of the Turkic languages spoken across Central Asia is categorized as the Oguz group, which comprises languages such as Turkish, Uzbek, Kazakh, Tatar, Uighur, Kyrgyz, Tadjik, Chuvash and Azerbaijani.

We can divide the history of the language into three major phases as old Turkish (from the 7th to the 13th century), mid-Turkish (13th to the 20th) and new Turkish from the 20th century onwards. When the Ottoman Empire ruled, Persian and Arabic words integrated into Turkish and as a result of that, it turned out to be a combination of these three different languages. Over the course of the Ottoman sovereignty, which lasted almost seven centuries, the evolution of Turkish language was impeded. When it comes to the written language of the Ottoman Empire, however, Turkish language served only as a basis for Ottoman Turkish. If we delve into the structure of Ottoman Turkish, we find that it is Turkish at its core, but as it underwent a heavy invasion of Persian and Arabic vocabularies, and was to a large extent even influenced grammatically, it it evolved quite differently. As Ottoman Turkish used with spoken Turkish was seen as “gutter language”, it was not considered as worthy of study. The standard Turkish used in Turkey now derives from the Old Anatolian Turkish, which was brought into Anatolia by the Seljuk Turks in the late 11th century. Nevertheless, today it is represented using the Latin alphabet introduced in 1928 by Ataturk (founder of the Republic of Turkey), whereas before it was represented by the use of the Ottoman Turkish Alphabet, which is a variant of Perso-Arabic script. Therefore considering its origin and the change it has undergone over the course of history, it distinguishes from other Turkic languages in terms of dialects and accents.

Moreover, there are several dialects in Turkish. They are divided into two major groups as Western Dialects and Eastern Dialects. The Danubian dialect, which is considered as one of the major Turkish dialects, seems to be the only member of the Western group. The Eastern group consists of Dinler, Edirne, Eskisehir, Gaziantep, Razgrad, Rumelian, Karamanli, and Urfa dialects. Yet, there also exist other categorizations forming dialect groups such as Central-Anatolia, Rumelian, Kastamonu and Southwestern dialects. The Istanbul dialect, on the contrary, (which I speak, although I’m not an Istanbul native) is accepted as the modern standard dialect spoken throughout Turkey.

References

Turkce-Kac-Yasindadir

Turk Lehceleri Sozlugu

Başlıca Türk LehçeleriTurkish Language

By Nehir Güler
Student of MA Learning & Communication in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts
University of Luxembourg
Study visitor at TermCoord