Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Mod-

ern Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); 

Adil Ozdemir and Kenneth Frank, Visible Islam in 

Modern Turkey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); 

Hugh Poulton, Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish 

Nationalism and the Turkish Republic (London: Hurst, 

1997); Erik J. Zurcher, Turkey: A Modern History (Lon-

don: I.B. Tauris, 1997).

Turkish language and literature

Turkish is the official language of the Republic 

of  t

Urkey

, and it is also spoken among Turk-

ish minorities in surrounding countries such 

as Cyprus, Syria, Greece, and Bulgaria. It is a 

member of the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic 

family, which also includes Mongolian. It is part 

of the Turkic subbranch, so it is related to many 

languages of Central Asia, such as Uzbek, Kazakh, 

and Kyrgyz, but it is most closely related to Azeri 

and Turkmen. Like other languages of this family, 

Turkish is marked by the features of agglutina-

tion (multiple suffixes are added to roots, often 

producing very long words) and vowel harmony 

(suffix vowels are either front or back, according 

with the vowels of root syllables).

When the Turks converted to i

slam

, they 

adopted the Arabic 

alphabet

, and the Turkish 

language absorbed many Arabic words. Through 

contact with i

ran

, Persian vocabulary and gram-

matical structures also entered Turkish. By the time 

the Turks had migrated to Anatolia and the Otto-

man Empire was established, such foreign elements 

came to dominate the written court language, 

though the spoken language of the common people 

was less affected. After the Republic of Turkey was 

founded in 1923 a series of language reforms were 

introduced, intended to promote progress and 

influenced by the Turkish nationalist movement. 

In 1928 the Arabic alphabet was officially replaced 

with a modified Latin alphabet, which was thought 

to be more suitable to the Turkish language which 

and also established a link with the Western world. 

Attempts were also made to remove many Arabic 

and Persian elements, and new words based on 

Turkic roots were created to replace them.