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Interior of the Selimiye mosque in Edirne, Turkey

Welcome to the Turkish Language program website at Syracuse University. Turkish has been taught in the Department of Languages, Literature and Linguistics since 2003 and since 2004 both Turkish 101/102 and Turkish 201/202 have been offered.

Turkish belongs to the Turkic language family and in terms of the number of speakers it is the largest in the Turkic family, with over 70 million speakers. Turkish is the official language of the Turkish Republic, where it is the native language of over 90 per cent of the population. Turkish is also spoken in Cyprus, by Turkish Cypriots. The largest number of Turkish speakers outside Turkey is to be found in the Balkans, especially Bulgaria, but also in the former Yugoslavia and Greece. Furthermore, there are large numbers of Turkish “guest workers” and their families in a number of west European countries, especially in Germany.

One of the most striking properties of Turkish is its morphology, i.e. the structure of its words: there are neither prefixes nor infixes. All of the derivational and inflectional morphemes are suffixes. One can build very long words that can correspond to entire sentences in more familiar languages such as English. An often cited example is the following:

Amerikalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmıydılar?

This word means: “Did they belong to those whom we were unable to Americanize?”

Other interesting properties of the language concern its word order: the verb of a regular sentence is at the very end, the subject at the beginning, and the object is between the subject and the verb. This is the same word order also found in Korean and Japanese—an observation leading to the tentative hypothesis (the Altaic Hypothesis) that these languages, the Turkic languages and Mongolian are all historically related. Yet another striking property of Turkish is that most of its native words obey a generalization called Vowel Harmony: all of the vowels within a regular native word share certain properties of articulation.

A few observations about the geography of the Turkish Republic: Turkey is situated in an area where it is a link between Europe and Asia. It is bordered in the northwest by Greece and Bulgaria, in the east by the republics of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, and by Iran, and in the south by Syria and Iraq.

Anatolia (or Asia Minor), the Asian part of Turkey (ca. 97% of the geographic area of Turkey) is surrounded by four seas: the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean to the south, the Aegean to the west and the Sea of Marmara between the European and Asian land masses. Thrace, the European part of the country, is surrounded by the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmara, and the Aegean; the European and the Asian parts of the country come very close together at two straits: the Bosporus, and the Dardanelles.