Turkish Language Translation

World class Turkish language translation from qualified professional linguists

Number of Turkish native speakers globally: 78 million

Number of countries where Turkish is an official language: 2

• Around 60 million of the native speakers of Turkish are in Turkey itself, with the remainder largely elsewhere in South East Asia and with significant minorities in Cyprus, Germany, Bulgaria and Greece.
• Turkey joined the EU Customs Union in 1995 and is classified as ‘an emerging market’ according to the IMF.
• Cyprus has requested that the European Union add Turkish as an official EU language, even though Turkey is not a member state.

When we say ‘Turkish’, we need to be a little more specific: we are really referring to ‘Istanbul Turkish’, which is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages. This is the language spoken in Turkey and regulated by the Turkish Language Association.

The geographical spread of Turkish speakers is the inheritance of the Ottoman Empire, which took ‘Ottoman Turkish’ (the variety of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the empire) wherever it went.

As with so many things in the modern Turkish state, the imposition of ‘Istanbul Turkish’ can be traced back to Kemel Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey. Cultural reforms were a key part of his reinvention of Turkey as a post-Ottoman nation. Language reform was crucial to this.

Duly, in 1928, Atatürk decreed that the old Ottoman alphabet should be replaced with the Roman alphabet and that Turkish should be purged of loan words (mainly from Persian and Arabic). Indeed, Atatürk toured the country in person explaining why the language reforms were necessary. Incredibly, he decreed that the transition period for adopting the new alphabet should be … 3 months. Hence, Turkish quickly shed its Arabic script and now has 29 letters in its alphabet and reads left to right.