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The Turkish alphabet ( tr, ) is a
Latin-script alphabet A Latin-script alphabet (Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet) is an alphabet that uses letters of the Latin script. The 21-letter archaic Latin alphabet and the 23-letter classical Latin alphabet belong to the oldest of this group. The 26-letter ...
used for writing the
Turkish language Turkish ( , ), also referred to as Turkish of Turkey (''Türkiye Türkçesi''), is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 80 to 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and Northern Cyprus. Significant sma ...
, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which ( Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş and Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. This alphabet represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy and specificity. Mandated in 1928 as part of Atatürk's Reforms, it is the current official alphabet and the latest in a series of distinct alphabets used in different eras. The alphabet was created by
Agop Dilâçar Agop Dilâçar ( hy, Յակոբ Մարթայեան Hagop Martayan, Istanbul, 22 May 1895 – Istanbul, 12 September 1979) was a Turkish-Armenian linguist who specialized in Turkic languages and the first Secretary General and head specialist of th ...
(Martayan) ( hy, ) a linguist of Armenian origin. The Turkish alphabet has been the model for the official Latinization of several
Turkic languages The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turki ...
formerly written in the
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
or
Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking c ...
like
Azerbaijani Azerbaijani may refer to: * Something of, or related to Azerbaijan * Azerbaijanis * Azerbaijani language See also * Azerbaijan (disambiguation) * Azeri (disambiguation) * Azerbaijani cuisine * Culture of Azerbaijan The culture of Azerbaijan ...
(1991), Turkmen (1993), and recently Kazakh (2021).


History


Early reform proposals and alternate scripts

The earliest known Turkic alphabet is the
Orkhon script The Old Turkic script (also known as variously Göktürk script, Orkhon script, Orkhon-Yenisey script, Turkic runes) was the alphabet used by the Göktürks and other early Turkic khanates from the 8th to 10th centuries to record the Old Tu ...
, also known as the Old Turkic alphabet, the first surviving evidence of which dates from the 7th century. In general,
Turkic languages The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turki ...
have been written in a number of different alphabets including Uyghur,
Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...
,
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
,
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
,
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
, and some other Asiatic writing systems. Turkish was written using a Turkish form of the Arabic script for over 1,000 years. It was poorly suited to write works that incorporated a great deal of Arabic and Persian vocabulary as their spellings were largely unphonetic and thus had to be memorized. This created a significant barrier of entry as only highly formal and prestige versions of Turkish were top heavy in Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Not only would students have trouble predicting the spellings of certain Arabic and Persian words, but some of these words were so rarely used in common speech that their spellings would not register in the collective conscious of students. However, it was much better suited to the Turkish part of the vocabulary. Although Ottoman Turkish was never formally standardized by a decree of law, words of Turkic origin largely had de facto systematic spelling rules associated with them which made it easier to read and write. On the rare occasion a Turkic word had irregular spelling that had to be memorized, there was often a dialectal or historic phonetic rationale that would be validated by observing the speech of eastern dialects, Azeri, and Turkmen. Whereas Arabic is rich in consonants but poor in vowels, Turkish is the opposite; the script was thus inadequate at distinguishing certain Turkish vowels and the reader was forced to rely on context to differentiate certain words. The introduction of the telegraph in the 19th century exposed further weaknesses in the Arabic script, although this was buoyed to some degree by advances in the printing press and Ottoman Turkish Keyboard typewriters. Zürcher, Erik Jan. ''Turkey: a modern history'', p. 188. I.B.Tauris, 2004. The Turkic Kipchak
Cuman language Cuman or Kuman (also called Kipchak, Qypchaq or Polovtsian) was a Kipchak Turkic language spoken by the Cumans (Polovtsy, Folban, Vallany, Kun) and Kipchaks; the language was similar to today's various languages of the Kipchak-Cuman branch. C ...
was written in the Latin alphabet, for example in the
Codex Cumanicus The Codex Cumanicus is a linguistic manual of the Middle Ages, designed to help Catholic missionaries communicate with the Cumans, a nomadic Turkic people. It is currently housed in the Library of St. Mark, in Venice (BNM ms Lat. Z. 549 (=1597 ...
. Some Turkish reformists promoted the adoption of the Latin script well before Atatürk's reforms. In 1862, during an earlier period of reform, the statesman Münuf Pasha advocated a reform of the alphabet. At the start of the 20th century similar proposals were made by several writers associated with the Young Turks movement, including Hüseyin Cahit,
Abdullah Cevdet Abdullah Cevdet ( ota, عبدالله جودت‎; tr, Abdullah Cevdet Karlıdağ; 9 September 1869 – 29 November 1932) was a Kurdish intellectual and physician in the Ottoman Empire. He was one of the founders of the Committee of Union an ...
, and Celâl Nuri. The issue was raised again in 1923 during the first Economic Congress of the newly founded Turkish Republic, sparking a public debate that was to continue for several years. A move away from the Arabic script was strongly opposed by conservative and religious elements. It was argued that Romanisation of the script would detach Turkey from the wider Islamic world, substituting a "foreign" (i.e. European) concept of national identity for the traditional sacred community. Others opposed Romanisation on practical grounds; at that time there was no suitable adaptation of the Latin script that could be used for Turkish phonemes. Some suggested that a better alternative might be to modify the Arabic script to introduce extra characters to better represent Turkish vowels. In 1926, however, the Turkic republics of the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
adopted the Latin script, giving a major boost to reformers in Turkey. Turkish-speaking Armenians used the Mesrobian script to write Holy Bibles and other books in Turkish for centuries and the linguistic team which invented the modern Turkish alphabet included several Armenian linguists, such as
Agop Dilâçar Agop Dilâçar ( hy, Յակոբ Մարթայեան Hagop Martayan, Istanbul, 22 May 1895 – Istanbul, 12 September 1979) was a Turkish-Armenian linguist who specialized in Turkic languages and the first Secretary General and head specialist of th ...
.İrfan Özfatura
"Dilimizi dilim dilim... Agop Dilâçar"
(Turkish), Türkiye Gazetesi, April 3, 2011. Retrieved February 15, 2012
Karamanli Turkish Karamanlı Turkish ( tr, Karamanlı Türkçesi, el, Καραμανλήδικα, Karamanlídika) is a dialect of the Turkish language spoken by the Karamanlides. Although the official Ottoman Turkish was written in the Arabic script, the Karam ...
was, similarly, written with a form of the
Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as ...
.


Introduction of the modern Turkish alphabet

The current 29-letter Turkish alphabet was established as a personal initiative of the founder of the Turkish Republic,
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, or Mustafa Kemal Pasha until 1921, and Ghazi Mustafa Kemal from 1921 Surname Law (Turkey), until 1934 ( 1881 – 10 November 1938) was a Turkish Mareşal (Turkey), field marshal, Turkish National Movement, re ...
. It was a key step in the cultural part of Atatürk's Reforms, 2002 (the writing guide of the Turkish language) introduced following his consolidation of power. Having established a one-party state ruled by his
Republican People's Party The Republican People's Party ( tr, Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, , acronymized as CHP ) is a Kemalist and social-democratic political party in Turkey which currently stands as the main opposition party. It is also the oldest political party i ...
, Atatürk was able to sweep aside the previous opposition to implementing radical reform of the alphabet. He announced his plans in July 1928 and established a Language Commission () consisting of the following members: * Ragıp Hulusi Özden * İbrahim Grantay *
Ahmet Cevat Emre Ahmet Cevat Emre (1876–1961) was a Turkish journalist and linguist. He was a member of the Turkish Language Association (TDK) and involved in the latinization of the Turkish alphabet. He also served as a deputy for Çanakkale in the Grand Natio ...
* Mehmet Emin Erişirgil * İhsan Sungu * Avni Başman *
Falih Rıfkı Atay Falih Rıfkı Atay (1894– 20 March 1971) was a Turkish journalist, writer and politician between 1923 and 1950. Biography Falih Rıfkı was the son of Halil Hilmi Efendi, an imam. He was educated in Istanbul, Ottoman Empire. Falih began hi ...
* Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın * Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu *Ali Hayder Taner The commission was responsible for adapting the Latin script to meet the phonetic requirements of the Turkish language. The resulting Latin alphabet was designed to reflect the actual sounds of spoken Turkish, rather than simply transcribing the old Ottoman script into a new form.Zürcher, p. 189 Atatürk himself was personally involved with the commission and proclaimed an "alphabet mobilisation" to publicise the changes. He toured the country explaining the new system of writing and encouraging the rapid adoption of the new alphabet. The Language Commission proposed a five-year transition period; Atatürk saw this as far too long and reduced it to three months. The change was formalised by the Turkish Republic's law number 1353, the ''Law on the Adoption and Implementation of the Turkish Alphabet'', passed on 1 November 1928. Starting 1 December 1928, newspapers, magazines, subtitles in movies, advertisement and signs had to be written with the letters of the new alphabet. From 1 January 1929, the use of the new alphabet was compulsory in all public communications as well the internal communications of banks and political or social organisations. Books had to be printed with the new alphabet as of 1 January 1929 as well. The civil population was allowed to use the old alphabet in their transactions with the institutions until 1 June 1929. In the Sanjak of Alexandretta (today's province of
Hatay Hatay Province ( tr, Hatay ili, ) is the southernmost province of Turkey. It is situated almost entirely outside Anatolia, along the eastern coast of the Levantine Sea. The province borders Syria to its south and east, the Turkish province ...
), which was at that time under French control and would later join Turkey, the local Turkish-language newspapers adopted the Latin alphabet only in 1934. The reforms were also backed up by the ''Law on Copyrights'', issued in 1934, encouraging and strengthening the private publishing sector. In 1939, the ''First Turkish Publications Congress'' was organised in
Ankara Ankara ( , ; ), historically known as Ancyra and Angora, is the capital of Turkey. Located in the central part of Anatolia, the city has a population of 5.1 million in its urban center and over 5.7 million in Ankara Province, maki ...
for discussing issues such as copyright, printing, progress on improving the literacy rate and scientific publications, with the attendance of 186 deputies.


Political and cultural aspects

As cited by the reformers, the old Arabic script was much more difficult to learn than the new Latin alphabet. The literacy rate did indeed increase greatly after the alphabet reform, from around 10% to over 90%, but many other factors also contributed to this increase, such as the foundation of the
Turkish Language Association The Turkish Language Association ( tr, Türk Dil Kurumu, TDK) is the regulatory body for the Turkish language, founded on 12 July 1932 by the initiative of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and headquartered in Ankara, Turkey. The Institution acts as the ...
in 1932, campaigns by the Ministry of Education, the opening of Public Education Centres throughout the country, and Atatürk's personal participation in literacy campaigns. Atatürk also commented on one occasion that the symbolic meaning of the reform was for the Turkish nation to "show with its script and mentality that it is on the side of world civilisation". The second president of Turkey,
İsmet İnönü Mustafa İsmet İnönü (; 24 September 1884 – 25 December 1973) was a Turkish army officer and statesman of Kurdish descent, who served as the second President of Turkey from 11 November 1938 to 22 May 1950, and its Prime Minister three time ...
further elaborated the reason behind adopting a Latin alphabet:
The alphabet reform cannot be attributed to ease of reading and writing. That was the motive of
Enver Pasha İsmail Enver, better known as Enver Pasha ( ota, اسماعیل انور پاشا; tr, İsmail Enver Paşa; 22 November 1881 – 4 August 1922) was an Ottoman military officer, revolutionary, and convicted war criminal who formed one-third ...
. For us, the big impact and the benefit of an alphabet reform was that it eased the way to cultural reform. We inevitably lost our connection with Arabic culture.
The Turkish writer
Şerif Mardin Şerif Mardin (1927 – 6 September 2017) was a prominent Turkish sociologist, political scientist, academic and thinker. In a 2008 publication, he was referred to as the "doyen of Turkish sociology." Early life and education He was born in Ista ...
has noted that "Atatürk imposed the mandatory Latin alphabet in order to promote the national awareness of the Turks against a wider Muslim identity. It is also imperative to add that he hoped to relate Turkish nationalism to the modern civilisation of Western Europe, which embraced the Latin alphabet." The explicitly nationalistic and ideological character of the alphabet reform showed in the booklets issued by the government to teach the population the new script. They included sample phrases aimed at discrediting the Ottoman government and instilling updated Turkish values, such as: "Atatürk allied himself with the nation and drove the sultans out of the homeland"; "Taxes are spent for the common properties of the nation. Tax is a debt we need to pay"; "It is the duty of every Turk to defend the homeland against the enemies." The alphabet reform was promoted as redeeming the Turkish people from the neglect of the Ottoman rulers: "Sultans did not think of the public, Ghazi commander tatürksaved the nation from enemies and slavery. And now, he declared a campaign against ignorance lliteracy He armed the nation with the new Turkish alphabet." The historian
Bernard Lewis Bernard Lewis, (31 May 1916 – 19 May 2018) was a British American historian specialized in Oriental studies. He was also known as a public intellectual and political commentator. Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near ...
has described the introduction of the new alphabet as "not so much practical as pedagogical, as social and cultural – and Mustafa Kemal, in forcing his people to accept it, was slamming a door on the past as well as opening a door to the future". It was accompanied by a systematic effort to rid the Turkish language of Arabic and Persian loanwords, often replacing them with revived early Turkic words. However, the same reform also rid the language of many Western loanwords, especially French, in favor of Turkic words, albeit to a lesser degree. Atatürk told his friend Falih Rıfkı Atay, who was on the government's Language Commission, that by carrying out the reform, "we were going to cleanse the Turkish mind from its Arabic roots." Yaşar Nabi, a leading journalist, argued in the 1960s that the alphabet reform had been vital in creating a new Western-oriented identity for Turkey. He noted that younger Turks, who had only been taught the Latin script, were at ease in understanding Western culture but were quite unable to engage with Middle Eastern culture. The new script was adopted very rapidly and soon gained widespread acceptance. Even so, older people continued to use the Turkish Arabic script in private correspondence, notes and diaries until well into the 1960s.


Letters

The following table presents the Turkish letters, the sounds they correspond to in
International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
and how these can be approximated more or less by an English speaker. : Of the 29 letters, eight are vowels ( A, E, I, İ, O, Ö, U, Ü); the other 21 are consonants. Dotted and
dotless I I, or ı, called dotless I, is a letter used in the Latin-script alphabets of Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Gagauz, Kazakh, Tatar, Kyrgyz, and Turkish. It commonly represents the close back unrounded vowel , except in Kazakh where it represen ...
are distinct letters in Turkish such that ⟨i⟩ becomes ⟨İ⟩ when capitalised, ⟨I⟩ being the capital form of ⟨ı⟩. Turkish also adds a
circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around" ...
over the
back vowel A back vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the highest point of the tongue is positioned relatively back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be c ...
s ⟨â⟩ and ⟨û⟩ following ⟨k⟩, ⟨g⟩, or ⟨l⟩ when these consonants represent , , and (instead of , , and ): * â for and/or to indicate that the consonant before â is palatalised; e.g. means "profit", while means "snow". * î for (no palatalisation implied, however lengthens the pronunciation of the vowel). * û for and/or to indicate palatalisation. In the case of length distinction, these letters are used for old Arabic and Persian borrowings from the
Ottoman Turkish Ottoman Turkish ( ota, لِسانِ عُثمانى, Lisân-ı Osmânî, ; tr, Osmanlı Türkçesi) was the standardized register of the Turkish language used by the citizens of the Ottoman Empire (14th to 20th centuries CE). It borrowed extens ...
period, most of which have been eliminated from the language. Native Turkish words have no vowel length distinction, and for them the circumflex is used solely to indicate palatalisation. Turkish orthography is highly regular and a word's pronunciation is usually identified by its spelling.


Distinctive features

Dotted and
dotless I I, or ı, called dotless I, is a letter used in the Latin-script alphabets of Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Gagauz, Kazakh, Tatar, Kyrgyz, and Turkish. It commonly represents the close back unrounded vowel , except in Kazakh where it represen ...
are separate letters, each with its own uppercase and lowercase forms. The lowercase form of ''I'' is ''ı'', and the lowercase form of ''İ'' is ''i''. (In the original law establishing the alphabet, the dotted ''İ'' came before the undotted ''I''; now their places are reversed.) The letter ''J'', however, uses a tittle in the same way
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
does, with a dotted lowercase version, and a dotless uppercase version. Optional
circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around" ...
accents can be used with "â", "î" and "û" to disambiguate words with different meanings but otherwise the same spelling, or to indicate palatalisation of a preceding consonant (for example, while means "snow", means "profit"), or long vowels in
loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because ...
s, particularly from
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
.


Software localisation

In
software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invo ...
, the Turkish alphabet is known for requiring special logic, particularly due to the varieties of i and their lowercase and uppercase versions. This has been called the Turkish-I problem.


Keyboard layout

The standard Turkish keyboard layouts for personal computers are as follows: :: ::


See also

*
Common Turkic Alphabet The Common Turkic Alphabet ( tr, Ortak türk alfabesi; az, Ortaq türk əlifbası, اورتاق تورک الیفباسی; tt-Cyrl, Уртак төрки әлифба, translit=Urtaq törki älifba; kk, Ortaq türkı älıpbiı) is a project of ...
* Turkish Braille *
Turkish phonology The phonology of Turkish deals with current phonology and phonetics, particularly of Istanbul Turkish. A notable feature of the phonology of Turkish is a system of vowel harmony that causes vowels in most words to be either front or back an ...
* Uniform Turkic Alphabet


References


External links


Yunus Emre Enstitusu – Online LearningOnline TurkishTurkish Alphabet Pronunciation
* Dilek Nur Polat Ünsür (22 Mac 2021).
How Newspapers Familiarized Readers with the Latin Script During the Turkish Alphabet Reform
, ''ATypI 2020'' presentation {{DEFAULTSORT:Turkish Alphabet
Alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
Latin alphabets Spelling reform Writing systems introduced in 1928 Alphabets used by Turkic languages mn:Түрк хэл бичиг