Language
The Turkish language, which is of the Altaic language family and a southern Oghuz dialect of the Turkic languages, is natively spoken by the Turkish people in Turkey, Bulgaria, the island of Cyprus, Greece (primarily in Western Thrace), Kosovo, the Republic of Macedonia, Meskhetia, Romania, and other areas of traditional settlement which were formerly, in whole or part, belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Turkish is the official language of Turkey and is one of the official languages of Cyprus. It also has official (but not primary) status in the Prizren District of Kosovo and several municipalities of the Republic of Macedonia, depending on the concentration of Turkish-speaking local population. Modern standard Turkish is based on the dialect of Istanbul. Nonetheless, dialectal variation persists, in spite of the levelling influence of the standard used in mass media and the Turkish education system since the 1930s. The terms ağız or şive are often used to refer to the different types of Turkish dialects (such as Cypriot Turkish).
Read more about this topic: Turkish People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence above language.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)