Türkiye Languages

Asia Turkey

Most of the people in Turkey speak Turkish. Turkish is a non-Semitic language unrelated to Arabic. Until 1928 it was written mostly in a modified Arabic alphabet, though other alphabets were used, including Greek and Armenian. The Roman alphabet was introduced in 1928. It uses diacritic marks (ç ğ ş ö ü) and two versions of the letter “i” (dotted - i and undotted - ı ) and is accepted as the official alphabet of the language. Records of the Ottoman Empire were generally written in Turkish in the old Arabic script. In older documents the sijâqat form of the script was used. Being a half cipher/shorthand script used for speed and secrecy, it lacks paleographic devices that distinguish among letters as in the ordinary Arabic script. Deciphering personal names is extremely challenging. A few records were written in Arabic. Although Kurdish is a significant minority language, there are almost no historical documents written in Kurdish. When written, Kurdish used the Arabic alphabet. The Kurdish language in Turkey is now written using the modern Turkish alphabet. The records of various Christian minorities are in Armenian, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, or Syriac, each with its own distinctive writing system.