Portal:Language/Language of the month/May 2007

Turkish (Türkçe) is a Turkic language, a part of the hypothetical Altaic language family, spoken predominantly in Turkey, with smaller communities of speakers in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Russia, Greece, the Republic of Macedonia, and Romania, as well as by several million immigrants in Western Europe. Turkish is the largest member of the Turkic language family in terms of the number of speakers, with 65 – 73.5 million people in the world who speak it as their mother tongue. The history of the language spans over 1200 years. Ancient engravings of the Turkish language have been found in Mongolia in the Orkhon Valley. The rise of the Ottoman Empire made the language widespread, creating the literary language of Ottoman Turkish. Find out more...