Interesting facts about the language

Turkish belongs to the Turkic language family. These languages are characterized by their agglutinative structure. To learn and understand Turkish, you first need to understand what an agglutinative language is. The word "agglutinate" comes from Latin and means "to clump" or "to stick together." The central principle of this type of language structure is the suffix. A suffix is a suffix added to the end of a word, thus changing or expanding its meaning. The best way to understand this is with an example. Let's take the Turkish "okullarda": This expression contains a lot of information all at once. The first part of the word (okul) means school or the school.

It is difficult to distinguish between the two in Turkish as there is no definite article. The plural of school in Turkish is okullar (the schools). Finally, Okullarda can be translated into German as in die Schulen (in the schools). Around 70 million people speak Turkish as their native language. Most of them live in Turkey, where Turkish is, of course, the country's official language. Turkish is also one of the two official languages in Cyprus. The language area in which you can use your new Turkish skills is much larger, however: the language is also spoken by Turkish minorities in Azerbaijan, throughout the Balkans, in Iran, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Many Turks have also emigrated over the past few decades and now live in Belgium, Germany, France, Canada, the Netherlands, Austria, Romania and the USA. In the Federal Republic of Germany alone, there are now more than two million native Turkish speakers.

The modern Turkish alphabet consists of 29 letters: 21 consonants and 8 vowels. If you learn Turkish as a native German speaker, you will quickly learn to write and pronounce the new letters ç, ğ, ı, İ, and ş.