The Turkish alphabet () is a
Latin-script alphabet
A Latin-script alphabet (Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet) is an alphabet that uses Letter (alphabet), letters of the Latin script. The 21-letter archaic Latin alphabet and the 23-letter classical Latin alphabet belong to the oldest of this gr ...
used for writing the
Turkish language
Turkish ( , , also known as 'Turkish of Turkey') is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, a member of Oghuz languages, Oghuz branch with around 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and one of two official languag ...
, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which (
Ç,
Äž,
I,
İ,
Ö,
Åž 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
Atatürk's reforms ( or ''Atatürk Devrimleri''), also referred to as the Turkish Revolution (Turkish language, Turkish: ''Türk Devrimi''), were a series of political, legal, religious, cultural, social, and economic policy changes, designed ...
, it is the current official alphabet and the latest in a series of distinct alphabets used in different eras.
The Turkish alphabet has been the model for the official
Latinization of several
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages are a language family of more than 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 West Asia. The Turkic langua ...
formerly written in the
Arabic
Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
or
Cyrillic script
The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...
like
Azerbaijani (1991),
Turkmen (1993), and recently
Kazakh (2021).
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 standard written 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 and Turkish. It commonly represents the close back unrounded vowel , except in Kazakh where it represents the ...
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 "bent around"a translation of ...
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 (, ; ) was the standardized register of the Turkish language in the Ottoman Empire (14th to 20th centuries CE). It borrowed extensively, in all aspects, from Arabic and Persian. It was written in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet. ...
period, most of which have been eliminated from the language. Native Turkish words have no vowel length distinction. The combinations of , , and with and also mainly occur in loanwords, but may also occur in native Turkish compound words, as in the name
Dilâçar (from + ).
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 and Turkish. It commonly represents the close back unrounded vowel , except in Kazakh where it represents the ...
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
The tittle or superscript dot is the dot on top of lowercase ''i'' and ''j''. In English writing the tittle is a diacritic which only appears as part of these glyphs, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages. In mos ...
in the same way English 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 "bent around"a translation of ...
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 a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...
s, particularly from Arabic
Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
.
Software localisation
In software development
Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...
, 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.
History
Early reform proposals and alternate scripts
The earliest known Turkic alphabet is the Orkhon script, 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 more than 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 West Asia. The Turkic langua ...
have been written in a number of different alphabets including Uyghur
Uyghur may refer to:
* Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group living in Eastern and Central Asia (West China)
** Uyghur language, a Turkic language spoken primarily by the Uyghurs
*** Old Uyghur language, a different Turkic language spoken in the Uyghur K ...
, Cyrillic
The Cyrillic 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 countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...
, Arabic
Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
, Greek
Greek may refer to:
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 of all kno ...
, Latin
Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
, and some other Asiatic writing systems.
Ottoman 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. ]
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
The Young Turks (, also ''Genç Türkler'') formed as a constitutionalist broad opposition-movement in the late Ottoman Empire against the absolutist régime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (). The most powerful organization of the movement, ...
movement, including Hüseyin Cahit, Abdullah Cevdet, 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 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
adopted the Latin script, giving a major boost to reformers in Turkey.
Turkish-speaking Armenians used the Mesrobian script to write the Bible
The Bible is a collection of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and esteemed in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) originally writt ...
and other books in Turkish for centuries. Karamanli Turkish
Karamanli Turkish (; ) is an extinct dialect of the Turkish language spoken by the Karamanlides. Although the official Ottoman Turkish was written in the Arabic script, the Karamanlides used the Greek alphabet to write their form of Turkish. K ...
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 BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as wel ...
.
Atatürk himself had a longstanding conviction that the Turkish alphabet should be Latinised. He told Ruşen Eşref that he had been preoccupied with this idea during his time in Syria (1905–1907), and would later use a French-influenced Latinised rendering of Turkish in his private correspondence, as well as confide in Halide Edip
In chemistry, a halide (rarely halogenide) is a binary chemical compound, of which one part is a halogen atom and the other part is an element or radical that is less electronegative (or more electropositive) than the halogen, to make a fl ...
in 1922 about his vision for a new alphabet. An early Latinisation of the Turkish language was made by Gyula Németh in his ''Türkische Grammatik'', published in 1917, which had significant variations from the current script, for example using the Greek gamma
Gamma (; uppercase , lowercase ; ) is the third letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 3. In Ancient Greek, the letter gamma represented a voiced velar stop . In Modern Greek, this letter normally repr ...
where today's ''ğ'' would be used. Hagop Martayan (later Dilâçar) brought this to Mustafa Kemal's attention in the initial years after the book's publication but Kemal did not like this transcription. The encounter with Martayan and looking at Németh's transcription represented the first instance where Kemal would see a systematically Latinised version of Turkish.
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 ( 1881 – 10 November 1938) was a Turkish field marshal and revolutionary statesman who was the founding father of the Republic of Turkey, serving as its first President of Turkey, president from 1923 until Death an ...
. It was a key step in the cultural part of Atatürk's Reforms
Atatürk's reforms ( or ''Atatürk Devrimleri''), also referred to as the Turkish Revolution (Turkish language, Turkish: ''Türk Devrimi''), were a series of political, legal, religious, cultural, social, and economic policy changes, designed ...
,[ 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 (RPP; , CHP ) is a Kemalism, Kemalist and Social democracy, social democratic political party in Turkey. It is the oldest List of political parties in Turkey, political party in Turkey, founded by Mustafa Kemal ...
, 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 EriÅŸirgil
* İhsan Sungu
* Avni BaÅŸman
* Falih Rıfkı Atay
* Ruşen Eşref Ünaydın
* Yakup Kadri KaraosmanoÄŸlu
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 (, ) is the southernmost Provinces of Turkey, province and Metropolitan municipalities in Turkey, metropolitan municipality of Turkey. Its area is , and its population is 1,686,043 (2022). It is situated mostly outside Anatolia, ...
), 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 is the capital city of Turkey and List of national capitals by area, the largest capital by area in the world. Located in the Central Anatolia Region, central part of Anatolia, the city has a population of 5,290,822 in its urban center ( ...
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 (, TDK) is the List of language regulators, 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 ...
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 politician and military officer who served as the second List of Presidents of Turkey, president of Turkey from 1938 to 1950, and as its Prime Minister of Turkey, pr ...
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
İsmâil Enver (; ; 23 November 1881 – 4 August 1922), better known as Enver Pasha, was an Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Turkish people, Turkish military officer, revolutionary, and Istanbul trials of 1919–1920, convicted war criminal who was a p ...
. 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 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
Pedagogy (), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political, and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken ...
, 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."
YaÅŸar 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.[Toprak, p. 145, fn. 21] 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.
Keyboard layout
The standard Turkish keyboard layout
A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual, or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. Standard keybo ...
s for personal computers are shown below. The first is known as Turkish F, designed in 1955 by the leadership of İhsan Sıtkı Yener ( tr) with an organization based on letter frequency in Turkish words. The second as Turkish Q, an adaptation of the QWERTY keyboard to include six additional letters found in the Turkish language.
Turkish F-keyboard
::
Turkish Q-keyboard
::
See also
* Common Turkic Alphabet
* Turkish Braille
* Turkish phonology
* Uniform Turkic Alphabet
References
External links
Yunus Emre Enstitusu – Online Learning
Online Turkish
The Turkish Alphabet Pronunciation & Examples
* 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 standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
Latin alphabets
Spelling reform
Writing systems introduced in 1928
Alphabets used by Turkic languages