How many characters are in the Turkish alphabet?
Turkish alphabet
The current 29-letter Turkish alphabet was established as a personal initiative of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It was a key step in the cultural part of Atatürk's Reforms, introduced following his consolidation of power. Having established a one-party state ruled by his Republican People's Party, 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:
Turkish alphabet
The letters of the Turkish alphabet are:
İbrahim Şinasi
Şinasi altered the paradigm of writing within the Ottoman Empire by simplifying the language, intentionally engaging directly with an increasingly literate public, and introducing new, more European, genres to the masses. He attempted to forge a pure Turkish ("öz Türkçe"), through the elimination of words borrowed from other languages in order to make the content and style of his work more appealing and easier to comprehend. At the time of his death, Şinasi was working on a large-scale Turkish dictionary in order to help formalize the language. He also simplified the Arabic-based Ottoman Turkish script, combining the "nashk" and "kufi" calligraphy, but he "only succeeded in reducing the more than five hundred signs used since Muteferrika first cut his type to 112.".
Turkish alphabet
Turkish was written using a Turkish form of the Arabic script for over 1,000 years. It was well suited to write Ottoman Turkish which incorporated a great deal of Arabic and Persian vocabulary. However, it was poorly suited to the Turkish part of the vocabulary. Whereas Arabic is rich in consonants but poor in vowels, Turkish is exactly the opposite. The script was thus inadequate at representing Turkish phonemes. Some could be expressed using four different Arabic signs; others could not be expressed at all. The introduction of the telegraph and printing press in the 19th century exposed further weaknesses in the Arabic script.
Armenians in Turkey
The Armenian alphabet was also used alongside the Arabic alphabet on official documents of the Ottoman Empire, written in Ottoman Turkish. For example, the Aleppo edition of the official gazette of the Ottoman Empire, called "Frat" (Turkish and Arabic for the Euphrates) contained a Turkish section of laws printed in Armenian alphabet.
English alphabet
The modern English alphabet is a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an uppercase and a lowercase form, and the same letters constitute the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The exact shape of printed letters varies depending on the typeface (and font), and the shape of handwritten letters can differ significantly from the standard printed form (and between individuals), especially when written in cursive style.
English is the only major modern European language requiring no diacritics for native words (although a diaeresis is used by some publishers in words such as "coöperation" or "naïve"). Written English does, however, have a number of digraphs.
The alphabet's current form originated from Latin script in about the 7th century. Since then, various letters have been added, or removed, to give the current Modern English alphabet of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form:
Armenian alphabet
For about 250 years, from the early 18th century until around 1950, more than 2,000 books in the Turkish language were printed using the Armenian alphabet. Not only did Armenians read this Turkish in Armenian script, so did the non-Armenian (including the Ottoman Turkish) elite. An American correspondent in Marash in 1864 calls the alphabet "Armeno-Turkish", describing it as consisting of 31 Armenian letters and "infinitely superior" to the Arabic or Greek alphabets for rendering Turkish. This Armenian script was used alongside the Arabic script on official documents of the Ottoman Empire written in Ottoman Turkish. For instance, the first novel to be written in Turkish in the Ottoman Empire was Vartan Pasha's 1851 "Akabi Hikayesi", written in the Armenian script. When the Armenian Duzian family managed the Ottoman mint during the reign of Abdülmecid I, they kept records in Armenian script but in the Turkish language. From the middle of the 19th century, the Armenian alphabet was also used for books written in the Kurdish language in the Ottoman Empire.
Diaeresis (diacritic)
When Turkish switched from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet in 1928, it adopted a number of diacritics borrowed from various languages, including and from German (probably reinforced by their use in languages like Swedish, Hungarian, etc.). These Turkish graphemes represent sounds similar to their respective values in German (see "Turkish alphabet").
Turkish language
The reform of the script was an important step in the cultural reforms of the period. The task of preparing the new alphabet and selecting the necessary modifications for sounds specific to Turkish was entrusted to a Language Commission composed of prominent linguists, academics, and writers. The introduction of the new Turkish alphabet was supported by public education centers opened throughout the country, cooperation with publishing companies, and encouragement by Atatürk himself, who toured the country teaching the new letters to the public. As a result, there was a dramatic increase in literacy from its original Third World levels.
Turkish alphabet
Of these 29 letters, eight are vowels (A, E, I, İ, O, Ö, U, Ü); the other 21 are consonants.
ISO/IEC 8859-9
ISO/IEC 8859-9:1999, "Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 9: Latin alphabet No. 5", is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1989. It is informally referred to as Latin-5 or "Turkish". It was designed to cover the Turkish language, designed as being of more use than the ISO/IEC 8859-3 encoding. It is identical to ISO/IEC 8859-1 except for these six replacements of Icelandic characters with characters unique to the Turkish alphabet:
ISO-8859-9 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. In modern applications Unicode and UTF-8 are preferred. 0.1% of all web pages use ISO-8859-9 in February 2016.
Turkish alphabet
The names of the vowel letters are the vowels themselves, whereas the names of the consonant letters are the consonant plus "e".
Karelian alphabet
The modern unified Karelian alphabet is a used to write all variants of the Karelian language except Tver Karelian. It consists of a total of twenty-eight characters: twenty-two are from the ISO basic Latin alphabet, five are derived from basic Latin letters by the addition of diacritical marks, and the final character is the apostrophe, which signifies palatalization of the preceding sound. The entire range of sounds of native Karelian words is intended to be represented by this set of characters.
Atatürk's Reforms
Atatürk himself was personally involved with the commission and proclaimed an "alphabet mobilisation" to publicise the changes. In 1926 the Turkic republics of the Soviet Union adopted the Latin script, giving a major boost to reformers in Turkey. On 1 November 1928, the new Turkish alphabet was introduced by the "Language Commission" at the initiative of Atatürk, replacing the previously used Perso-Arabic script. 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 formalized by the Turkish Republic's law number 1353, the "Law on the Adoption and Implementation of the Turkish Alphabet", passed on 1 November 1928. The law went into effect from 1 January 1929, making the use of the new alphabet compulsory in all public communications.
Hagop Vahram Çerçiyan
During the initial years of the Turkish Republic and under the reforms of Atatürk, a Latin-based alphabet was introduced to replace the Perso-Turkic script then in use. As part of the reforms, Turkish citizens were also required to take up a last name under the Surname Law in 1934. Prior to this, Turkey's Christian and Jewish citizens were already using surnames, but Muslims did not use surnames. Muslims were generally referred by their social or professional titles such as "Pasha", "Hoca", "Bey", "Hanım", "Efendi", or their names were complemented with that of their father. Mustafa Kemal himself was required to take up a surname, and the Turkish Parliament gave him the surname Atatürk, meaning father of the Turks. Many members of parliament, including some of Çerçiyan's former students, suggested that Atatürk needed a new signature for his name. On a November morning in 1934, members of parliament presented the proposal to Çerçiyan, who accepted the task. That night, five model signatures were prepared and the following morning, police officers arrived to collect them. Atatürk personally selected the one of "K. Atatürk" from these five model signatures.
Sükhbaatar inscriptions
Professor Osawa Takashi has found two inscriptions, 3 to 4 meters in length. They are the biggest Turkic epigraphs ever discovered. Inscriptions have 2,832 letters, 646 words in 20 lines, and, on the upper part, some 30 tamga, tribal markings.
Ğ
The letter, and its counterpart in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, , were once pronounced as a consonant, , the voiced velar fricative, until very recently in the history of Turkish, but it has undergone a sound change by which the consonant was completely lost and compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel occurred, hence its function today. The sound change is not yet complete in some Turkish dialects. The previous consonantal nature of the sound is evinced by earlier English loanwords from Turkish, such as "yogurt"/"yoghurt" (modern Turkish "yoğurt") and "agha" (modern Turkish "ağa"), and the corresponding velar fricative found in cognate words in the closely related Azerbaijani language and the Turkish-influenced Crimean Tatar language. In Old Turkic (as well as earlier during Proto-Turkic times), this voiced velar fricative originated as an allophone of , the voiced velar stop, when it occurred intervocalically. The expected process of lenition (weakening and eventual loss of the intervocalic Proto-Turkic consonant *) is thus complete in Turkish and underway in many other Common Turkic languages.
Turkish vocabulary
In the ninth century, Turks began to convert to Islam and to use the Arabic alphabet. When the Seljuk Turks overran Iran (Persia), they adopted for official and literary use the Persian language—which meanwhile had borrowed many Armenian and Arabic words. Thus educated Turks had available for their use the vocabularies of three languages: Turkish, Arabic, and Persian.
Telephone numbers in Turkey
Telephone numbers in Turkey went from six (2+4) to seven digits (3+4) local phone numbers c.1988, at which time Ankara went from 41 to 4. There used to be more than 5,000 local area codes of varying lengths (one to five digits) with correspondingly varying local number lengths (seven to three digits).
Azerbaijani alphabet
From the nineteenth century there were efforts by some intellectuals like Mirza Fatali Akhundov and Mammad agha Shahtakhtinski to replace the Arabic script and create a Latin alphabet for Azeri. In 1929, a Latin alphabet was created by Soviet Union sponsored "Yeni türk əlifba komitəsi" (New Turkish Alphabet Committee; Јени түрк əлифба комитəси) in Baku which hoped that the new alphabet would divide the Azerbaijanis in the USSR from those living in Iran.
An additional reason for the soviet regime's encouragement of a non-Arabic script was that they hoped the transition would work towards secularizing Azerbaijan's Muslim culture and since language script reform, proposed as early as the 19th century by Azeri intellectuals (e.g. Mirza Fatali Akhundov), had previously been rejected by the Azeri religious establishment on the grounds that Arabic script, the language of the Koran, was "holy and should not be tampered with" there was some historical basis for the reform which received overwhelming support at the First Turcological Congress in Baku during 1926 where the reform was voted for 101 to 7. The Azeri poet Samad Vurgun declared "Azerbaijani people are proud of being the first among Oriental nations that buried the Arabic alphabet and adopted the Latin alphabet. This event is written in golden letters of our history"
As a result, in the Soviet Union in 1926 the Uniform Turkic Alphabet was introduced to replace the varieties of the Arabic script in use at the time. In 1939, during the Red terror campaign, Joseph Stalin ordered that the Azeri script used in the USSR again be changed, this time to the Cyrillic script in order to sever the soviet Azerbaijanis ties with the people in the Republic of Turkey.
Ottoman Turkish alphabet
Arabic and Persian borrowings are written in their original orthography: "sabit" 'firm' is written as "s̱’bt", with "s̱" representing /s/ (in Arabic /θ/), and "’" representing /aː/ as in Arabic but with no indication of the short /i/. The letters ث ح ذ ض ظ ع are found only in borrowings from Arabic; ژ is only in borrowings from Persian and French. Although the Arabic vowel points ("harakat") can be used "s̱a’bit", they are generally found only in dictionaries and didactic works, as in Arabic and Persian, and they still do not identify vowel sounds unambiguously.
Turkish language
Following the adoption of Islam c. 950 by the Kara-Khanid Khanate and the Seljuq Turks, who are both regarded as the ethnic and cultural ancestors of the Ottomans, the administrative language of these states acquired a large collection of loanwords from Arabic and Persian. Turkish literature during the Ottoman period, particularly Divan poetry, was heavily influenced by Persian, including the adoption of poetic meters and a great quantity of imported words. The literary and official language during the Ottoman Empire period (c. 1299–1922) is termed Ottoman Turkish, which was a mixture of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic that differed considerably and was largely unintelligible to the period's everyday Turkish. The everyday Turkish, known as "kaba Türkçe" or "rough Turkish", spoken by the less-educated lower and also rural members of society, contained a higher percentage of native vocabulary and served as basis for the modern Turkish language.
Turkish Braille
Turkish Braille ("kabartma yazı") is the braille alphabet of the Turkish language.
Turkic peoples
Turkic peoples originally used their own alphabets, like Orkhon and Yenisey runiforms, and later the Uyghur alphabet. Traditional national and cultural symbols of the Turkic peoples include wolves in Turkic mythology and tradition; as well as the color blue, iron, and fire. Turquoise blue (the word "turquoise" comes from the French word meaning "Turkish") is the color of the stone turquoise still used in jewelry and as a protection against the evil eye.
Uyghur language
The Karluk language started to be written with the Perso-Arabic script (Kona Yëziq) in the 10th century upon the conversion of the Kara-Khanids to Islam. This Perso-Arabic script (Kona Yëziq) was reformed in the 20th century with modifications to represent all Modern Uyghur sounds including short vowels and eliminate Arabic letters representing sounds not found in Modern Uyghur. Unlike many other modern Turkic languages, Uyghur is primarily written using an Arabic alphabet, (with 4 alphabets like che-Pe-Zhe and Ga) although a Cyrillic alphabet and two Latin alphabets also are in use to a much lesser extent. Unusually for an alphabet based on the Persian, full transcription of vowels is indicated. (Among the Arabic family of alphabets, only a few, such as Kurdish, distinguish all vowels.)
Turkish alphabet
Turkish-speaking Armenians used the Mesrobian script to write Holy Bibles and other books in Turkish for centuries. Many Armenian linguists, including Agop Dilâçar comprised the linguistic team which invented the modern Turkish alphabet, using and modifying Latin script.
Arabic script
In the 20th century, the Arabic script was generally replaced by the Latin alphabet in the Balkans, parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia,
while in the Soviet Union, after a brief period of Latinisation, use of Cyrillic was mandated. Turkey changed to the Latin alphabet in 1928 as part of an internal Westernizing revolution. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of the Turkic languages of the ex-USSR attempted to follow Turkey's lead and convert to a Turkish-style Latin alphabet. However, renewed use of the Arabic alphabet has occurred to a limited extent in Tajikistan, whose language's close resemblance to Persian allows direct use of publications from Afghanistan and Iran.
Turkish alphabet
In the Sanjak of Alexandretta (today's province of Hatay), 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.
Kyrgyz alphabets
The Kyrgyz alphabets (, , , , ) are the alphabets used to write the Kyrgyz language. The Kyrgyz language uses the following alphabets:The Arabic script was traditionally used to write Kyrgyz before the introduction of the first Latin-based alphabets in 1927. Today an Arabic alphabet is used in China. The Uniform Turkic Alphabet was used in the USSR in the 1930s until its replacement by a Cyrillic script. The Kyrgyz Cyrillic alphabet is the alphabet used in Kyrgyzstan. It contains 36 letters: 33 from the Russian alphabet with 3 additional letters for sounds of the Kyrgyz language: Ң, Ү, Ө.
Gagauz alphabet
Beginning in 1957, Cyrillic was used up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1996 the Republic of Moldova officially introduced a Latin-based alphabet. This is modelled after the modern Turkish alphabet, with the addition of three letters: to represent the sound of (as in Azeri), to represent the (schwa) sound, which does not exist in Turkish, and or to represent the sound as in Romanian. On the other hand, unlike Crimean Tatar, Turkish, and some other Turkic languages, Gagauz does not have the letter , which had become completely silent in the Gagauz language. Note that cedillas should be used instead of commas for Ç, Ş, and Ţ for consistency, since C with comma does not exist in Romanian and Turkish uses cedillas for Ç and Ş, although Ț is often seen.
Turkish language
Turkish (), also referred to as Istanbul Turkish, is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 10–15 million native speakers in Southeast Europe (mostly in East and Western Thrace) and 60–65 million native speakers in Western Asia (mostly in Anatolia). Outside Turkey, significant smaller groups of speakers exist in Germany, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Northern Cyprus, Greece, the Caucasus, and other parts of Europe and Central Asia. Cyprus has requested that the European Union add Turkish as an official EU language, even though Turkey is not a member state.
Zazaki alphabet
The Zazaki alphabet is an extension of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Zaza language, consisting of 32 letters, seven of which (Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ü, Ş, and Ê) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language.
Turkish alphabet
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.
Istanbul
In modern Turkish, the name is written as "İstanbul", with a dotted İ, as the Turkish alphabet distinguishes between a dotted and dotless I. In English the stress is on the first or last syllable, but in Turkish it is on the second syllable ("tan"). A person from the city is an "İstanbullu" (plural: "İstanbullular"), although "Istanbulite" is used in English.
Turkish language
The vowels of the Turkish language are, in their alphabetical order, , , , , , , , . The Turkish vowel system can be considered as being three-dimensional, where vowels are characterised by how and where they are articulated focusing on three key features: front and back, rounded and unrounded and vowel height. Vowels are classified [±back], [±round] and [±high].
Turkic peoples
Xiongnu writing, older than Turkic, is agreed to have the earliest known Turkic alphabet, the Orkhon script. This has been argued recently using the only extant possibly Xiongu writings, the rock art of the Yinshan and Helan Mountains. It dates from the 9th millennium BCE to the 19th century, and consists mainly of engraved signs (petroglyphs) and few painted images. Excavations done during 1924–1925 in Noin-Ula kurgans located in the Selenga River in the northern Mongolian hills north of Ulaanbaatar produced objects with over 20 carved characters, which were either identical or very similar to the runic letters of the Turkic Orkhon script discovered in the Orkhon Valley.
Turkish alphabet
The historian Bernard Lewis 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."
Yañalif
Jaꞑalif, Yangalif or Yañalif (Tatar: jaꞑa əlifba/yaña älifba → jaꞑalif/yañalif , Cyrillic: Яңалиф, "new alphabet") is the first Latin alphabet used during the Soviet epoch for the Turkic languages (also Iranian languages, North Caucasian languages, Mongolian languages, Finno-Ugric languages, Tungus-Manchu languages, Paleo-Asiatic languages; project for Russian is unaccepted in 1930) in the 1930s. It replaced the "Yaña imlâ" Arabic script-based alphabet in 1928 and was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet in 1938-1940; several former Soviet states in Central Asia switched back to Latin script, with slight modifications to the original Jaꞑalif.
Keyboard layout
The Turkish language uses the Turkish Latin alphabet, and a dedicated keyboard layout was designed in 1955 by İhsan Sıtkı Yener(). During its design, letter frequencies in the Turkish language were investigated with the aid of Turkish Language Association. These statistics were then combined with studies on bone and muscle anatomy of the fingers to design the Turkish F-keyboard (). The keyboard provides a balanced distribution of typing effort between the hands: 49% for the left hand and 51% for the right. With this scientific preparation, Turkey has broken 14 world records in typewriting championships between 1957 and 1995. In 2009, Recep Ertaş and in 2011, Hakan Kurt from Turkey came in first in the text production event of the 47th (Beijing) and 48th (Paris) Intersteno congresses respectively. Despite the greater efficiency of the Turkish F-keyboard however, the modified QWERTY keyboard ("Q-keyboard") is the one that is used on most computers in Turkey. The reason for the popularity of QWERTY in Turkey is that they were overwhelmingly imported since the beginning of the 1990s.
Ottoman Turkish alphabet
Ottoman Turkish used Eastern Arabic numerals. The following is the list of basic cardinal numerals with the spelling in the modern Turkish alphabet:
Turkish literature
Turkish literature () comprises oral compositions and written texts in Turkic languages. The Ottoman and Azeri forms of Turkish, which forms the basis of much of the written corpus, were highly influenced by Persian and Arabic literature, and used the Ottoman Turkish alphabet.
Turkish alphabet
The one exception is "ğ" ("yumuşak ge"; i.e. "soft g"), which cannot begin a word:
Turkish language
To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkish—the variety of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire—spread as the Ottoman Empire expanded. In 1928, as one of Atatürk's Reforms in the early years of the Republic of Turkey, the Ottoman Turkish alphabet was replaced with a Latin alphabet.
Turkish alphabet
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.
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 formalized 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 the 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 organizations. 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.
Old Turkic alphabet
The Eurasiatic group is further divided into five related alphabets:
Old Turkic alphabet
The Unicode block for Old Turkic is U+10C00–U+10C4F. It was added to the Unicode standard in October 2009, with the release of version 5.2. It includes separate "Orkhon" and "Yenisei" variants of individual characters.
Atatürk's Reforms
A language commission was responsible for adapting the Latin script to meet the phonetic requirements of the Turkish language was established. The resulting Latin script was designed to reflect the actual sounds of spoken Turkish, rather than simply transcribing the old Ottoman script into a new form. The current 29-letter Turkish alphabet was established. The script was founded by an Armenian, Hagop Martayan Dilaçar. Appreciating his contribution, Atatürk suggested him the surname Dilaçar (literally meaning language opener), which he gladly accepted. It was a key step in the cultural part of Atatürk's Reforms. The Language Commission ("Dil Encümeni") consisting of the following members:
Kurdish alphabets
The development of the Unified Kurdish Alphabet has proceeded along three lines. First one letter has been designated for each sound (with the exception of digraph characters such as velar [ll], trill [rr], "jh" and "sh"). Second, no diacritical marks have been allowed that are difficult to convey via the Internet without the use of specialised programs. Specifically, all characters in the unified alphabet have been chosen carefully from the ISO-8859-1 "Latin 1" system for West European languages in order to ensure that the Kurdish characters follow one single global standard only. Loanwords need to naturalise and comply with common global Kurdish spelling rules whilst local exceptional pronunciations are also justified. The Kurdish Unified Alphabet contains 34 characters including 4 digraph cases (jh, ll, rr, sh) and 4 characters with diacritics (é, í, ú, ù). It represents 9 vowels (a, e, é, i, í, o, u, ú, ù) and 25 consonants:
Ottoman Turkish alphabet
The earliest known Turkic alphabet is the Orkhon script. The various Turkic languages have been written in a number of different alphabets, including Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Latin, and some other Asiatic writing systems.
Ottoman Turkish alphabet
The Ottoman Turkish alphabet ( "") is a version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet used to write Ottoman Turkish until 1928, when it was replaced by the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet.
Kazakh alphabets
In the nineteenth century, Ibrahim Altynsarin, a prominent Kazakh educator, first introduced a Cyrillic alphabet for transcribing Kazakh. Russian missionary activity, as well as Russian-sponsored schools, further encouraged the use of Cyrillic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The alphabet was reworked by Sarsen Amanzholov and accepted in its current form in 1940. It contains 42 letters: 33 from the Russian alphabet with 9 additional letters for sounds of the Kazakh language: Ә, Ғ, Қ, Ң, Ө, Ұ, Ү, Һ, І (until 1957 "Ӯ" was used instead of "Ұ"). Initially, Kazakh letters came after letters from the Russian alphabet, but now they are placed after Russian letters similar in sound or shape.
Ottoman Turkish language
Historically, Ottoman Turkish was transformed in three eras:In 1928, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, widespread language reforms (a part in the greater framework of Atatürk's Reforms) instituted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk saw the replacement of many Persian and Arabic origin loanwords in the language with their Turkish equivalents. It also saw the replacement of the Perso-Arabic script with the extended Latin alphabet. The changes were meant to encourage the growth of a new variety of written Turkish that more closely reflected the spoken vernacular and to foster a new variety of spoken Turkish that reinforced Turkey's new national identity as being a post-Ottoman state.
Kyrgyz alphabets
Although the Latin script is not in official use, some Kyrgyz texts are written in the Turkish variant of the Latin alphabet, and uses Turkish spelling norms e.g. for diphthongization ("ey", "ay" etc). Native Kyrgyz sound values are almost identical to Turkish, the exceptions being the velar nasal /ŋ/ and the voiceless uvular stop /q/ which do not exist in Turkish. In these cases they are written as "ñ" and "q" respectively.
Ottoman Turkish language
Historically speaking, Ottoman Turkish is the predecessor of modern Turkish. However, the standard Turkish of today is essentially "Türkiye Türkçesi" (Turkish of Turkey) as written in the Latin alphabet and with an abundance of neologisms added, which means there are now far fewer loan words from other languages, and Ottoman Turkish was not instantly transformed into the Turkish of today. At first, it was only the script that was changed, and while some households continued to use the Arabic system in private, most of the Turkish population was illiterate at the time, making the switch to the Latin alphabet much easier. Then, loan words were taken out, and new words fitting the growing amount of technology were introduced. Until the 1960s, Ottoman Turkish was at least partially intelligible with the Turkish of that day. One major difference between modern Turkish and Ottoman Turkish is the former's abandonment of compound word formation according to Arabic and Persian grammar rules. The usage of such phrases still exists in modern Turkish but only to a very limited extent and usually in specialist contexts; for example, the Persian genitive construction "takdîr-i ilâhî" (which reads literally as "the preordaining of the divine" and translates as "divine dispensation" or "destiny") is used, as opposed to the normative modern Turkish construction, "ilâhî takdîr" (literally, "divine preordaining").
Kurdish alphabets
Some scholars have suggested to add minor additions to Bedirxan's Hawar alphabet to make it more user-friendly. The additions correspond to sounds that are represented in the Sorani Arabic alphabet, but not in the Hawar alphabet. These scholars suggest this extended alphabet be called the universal Kurdish Latin alphabet. The suggested additional characters are Ł, Ň, Ř and Ü. The velar Ł/ł is for non-initial positions only; in Kurdish velar Ł never comes in initial position. The initial position in any Kurdish word beginning with r is pronounced and written as a trill Ř/ř. The letter Ü/ü is a new letter, which is sometimes written in the Sorani alphabet, and represents the close front rounded vowel [y] used in the Southern Kurdish dialects. The velar nasal consonant [ŋ] is also a Kurdish phoneme which never comes in initial position, and it is written as Ň/ň. The universal Kurdish Latin alphabet consists of 35 letters in total.
Tatar alphabet
The Keräşen Tatar ethnic group has used another Cyrillic alphabet, based on Russian, since the 19th century. This alphabet requires the Russian alphabet with pre-1917 orthography for Russian Christian religious words and Cyrillic letters А, О, У with umlauts for Tatar vowels and the ligature НГ (Ng). This alphabet is related to the Mari alphabet and was used because Christian Tatars couldn't use the Arabic script.
The official Cyrilic version of the Tatar alphabet used in Tatarstan contains 39 letters:
Ottoman Turkish alphabet
Though Ottoman Turkish was primarily written in this script, non-Muslim Ottoman subjects sometimes wrote it in other scripts, including the Armenian, Greek, Latin and Hebrew alphabets.
Turkish alphabet
Turkish also adds a circumflex over the back vowels ⟨â⟩ and ⟨û⟩ following ⟨k⟩, ⟨g⟩, or ⟨l⟩ when these consonants represent , , and (instead of , , and ):
Ottoman Turkish alphabet
The Ottoman Turkish alphabet is a Turkish form of the Perso-Arabic script. Well suited to writing Arabic and Persian borrowings, it was poorly suited to native Turkish words. When it came to consonants, Arabic has several consonants that do not exist in Turkish, making several Arabic letters superfluous except for Arabic loanwords; conversely, a few letters had to be invented to write letters in Persian and Turkish that Arabic did not have (such as "g" or "p"). In the case of vowels, Turkish contains eight different short vowels and no long ones, whereas Arabic (and Persian) have three short and three long vowels; further complicating matters was that in the Arabic script, only long vowels are usually expressed, making the Arabic script poorly suited for writing Turkish. The Arabic script had been designed to write Arabic, and while it was serviceable for Persian, it is quite inadequate at representing Turkish phonemes, especially the vowels. Still, Turkic languages such as Azerbaijani and Uzbek continue to be written using Arabic script in Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Turkish people
One important change to Turkish literature was enacted in 1928, when Mustafa Kemal initiated the creation and dissemination of a modified version of the Latin alphabet to replace the Arabic alphabet based Ottoman script. Over time, this change, together with changes in Turkey's system of education, would lead to more widespread literacy in the country. 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" often refer to the different types of Turkish dialects.
Turkish language
The earliest known Old Turkic inscriptions are the three monumental Orkhon inscriptions found in modern Mongolia. Erected in honour of the prince Kul Tigin and his brother Emperor Bilge Khagan, these date back to the second Turk Kaghanate. After the discovery and excavation of these monuments and associated stone slabs by Russian archaeologists in the wider area surrounding the Orkhon Valley between 1889 and 1893, it became established that the language on the inscriptions was the Old Turkic language written using the Old Turkic alphabet, which has also been referred to as "Turkic runes" or "runiform" due to a superficial similarity to the Germanic runic alphabets.
Turkish alphabet
The letters Q, W, and X of the ISO basic Latin alphabet do not occur in the Turkish alphabet (replacements for these letters are "K", "V" and "KS"), while dotted and dotless I are distinct letters in Turkish such that ⟨i⟩ becomes ⟨İ⟩ when capitalized, ⟨I⟩ being the capital form of ⟨ı⟩.
Turkish language
Turkish is written using a Latin alphabet introduced in 1928 by Atatürk to replace the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, a version of Perso-Arabic alphabet. The Ottoman alphabet marked only three different vowels—long "ā, ū" and "ī"—and included several redundant consonants, such as variants of "z" (which were distinguished in Arabic but not in Turkish). The omission of short vowels in the Arabic script was claimed to make it particularly unsuitable for Turkish, which has eight vowels.
Ottoman Turkish alphabet
Some Turkish reformers promoted 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 Turk movement, including Hüseyin Cahit, Abdullah Cevdet and Celâl Nuri.
Armenian alphabet
The standard Eastern and Western Armenian keyboards are based on the layout of the font Arasan. These keyboard layouts are mostly phonetic, and allow direct access to every character in the alphabet. Because there are more characters in the Armenian alphabet (39) than in Latin (26), some Armenian characters appear on non-alphabetic keys on a conventional QWERTY keyboard (for example, "շ" maps to ",").Information on Armenian character set encoding.
Laz language
In Turkey, Laz has been a written language since 1984, when an alphabet based on the Turkish alphabet was created. Since then, this system has been used in most of the handful of publications that have appeared in Laz. Developed specifically for the South Caucasian languages, the Georgian alphabet is better suited to the sounds of Laz, but the fact that most of the tongue's speakers live in Turkey, where the Latin alphabet is used, has rendered the adoption of the former impossible. Nonetheless, 1991 saw the publication of a textbook called Nana-nena ('Mother tongue'), which was aimed at all Laz speakers and used both the Latin and Georgian alphabets. The first Laz–Turkish dictionary was published in 1999.
Turkish alphabet
Turkish orthography is highly regular and a word's pronunciation is usually identified by its spelling. The following table presents the Turkish letters, the sounds they correspond to in International Phonetic Alphabet and how these can be approximated more or less by an English speaker.
Old Hungarian alphabet
The runic alphabet included 42 letters. As in the Old Turkic script, some consonants had two forms, one to be used with back vowels (a, á, o, ó, u, ú) and another for front vowels (e, é, i, í, ö, ő, ü, ű). The names of the consonants are always pronounced with a vowel. In the old alphabet, the consonant-vowel order is reversed, unlike today's pronunciation ("ep" rather than "pé"). This is because the oldest inscriptions lacked vowels and were rarely written down, similar to other ancient languages' consonant-writing systems (Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.). The alphabet did not contain letters for the phonemes dz and dzs of modern Hungarian, since these are relatively recent developments in the language's history. Nor did it have letters corresponding to the Latin q, w, x and y. The modern revitalization movement has created symbols for these; in Unicode encoding, they are represented as ligatures.
Ottoman Turkish language
Most Ottoman Turkish was written in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet ("elifbâ" ), a variant of the Perso-Arabic script. The Armenian, Greek and Rashi script of Hebrew were sometimes used by Armenians, Greeks and Jews.
Turkish grammar
Verbs have six grammatical persons (three singular and three plural), various voices (active and passive, reflexive, reciprocal, and causative), and a large number of grammatical tenses. Meanings such as "not", "be able", "must" and "if", which are expressed as separate words in most European languages, are usually expressed with verbal suffixes in Turkish. A characteristic of Turkish which is shared by neighboring languages such as Bulgarian and Persian is that the perfect tense suffix (in Turkish "-miş-", "-müş-", "-mış-", or "-muş-") often has an inferential meaning, e.g. "geliyormuşum" "it would seem (they say) that I am coming".
Kurdish languages
Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish, prohibiting the language in education and broadcast media. In March 2006, Turkey allowed private television channels to begin airing programming in Kurdish. However, the Turkish government said that they must avoid showing children's cartoons, or educational programs that teach Kurdish, and could broadcast only for 45 minutes a day or four hours a week. The state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) started its 24-hour Kurdish television station on 1 January 2009 with the motto "we live under the same sky". The Turkish Prime Minister sent a video message in Kurdish to the opening ceremony, which was attended by Minister of Culture and other state officials. The channel uses the "X", "W", and "Q" letters during broadcasting.However, most of these restrictions on private Kurdish television channels were relaxed in September 2009.In 2010, Kurdish municipalities in the southeast began printing marriage certificates, water bills, construction and road signs, as well as emergency, social and cultural notices in Kurdish alongside Turkish. Also Imams began to deliver Friday sermons in Kurdish and Esnaf price tags in Kurdish. Many mayors were tried for issuing public documents in Kurdish language. The Kurdish alphabet is not recognized in Turkey, and prior to 2013 the use of Kurdish names containing the letters "X", "W", and "Q", which do not exist in the Turkish alphabet, was not allowed. In 2012, Kurdish-language lessons became an elective subject in public schools. Previously, Kurdish education had only been possible in private institutions.
Gagauz alphabet
The current 31-letter Gagauz alphabet, used for the Gagauz language, is a Latin-based alphabet modelled after the Turkish.
Replacement of loanwords in Turkish
The 2005 edition of ", the official dictionary of the Turkish language published by Turkish Language Association, contains 104,481 words, of which about 86% are Turkish and 14% are of foreign origin. Among the most significant foreign contributors to Turkish vocabulary are Persian, French,
Italian, English, and Greek.
Turkish Language Association
The 2005 edition of "Güncel Türkçe Sözlük", the official dictionary of the Turkish language published by Turkish Language Association, contains 104,481 entries, of which about 86% are Turkish and 14% are of foreign origin. Among the most significant foreign contributors to Turkish vocabulary are Arabic, French, Persian, Italian, English, and Greek.
Ö
Other alphabets containing "o"-umlaut include: the Turkmen alphabet (for the vowel [ø]), the Azerbaijani alphabet (for the vowel [œ]), the Yapese alphabet (for [œ]), the Luxembourgian alphabet (when writing loanwords from Standard German), the Slovenian alphabet (when writing loanwords from German, Hungarian and Turkish), and the Dinka alphabet. The Hungarian alphabet contains both "ö" and "ő": "double acute o" is the longer pair of "ö". See double acute accent.
Arabic script
The Arabic script is the writing system used for writing Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa, such as Azerbaijani, Sindhi, Pashto, Persian, Kurdish, Lurish, Urdu, Mandinka, and others. Until the 16th century, it was also used to write some texts in Spanish. Additionally, Turkish, prior to the Turkish language reform, was written in Perso-Arabic script. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by the number of countries using it and the third by the number of users, after Latin and Chinese characters.
Turkish language
Latest 2010 edition of "Büyük Türkçe Sözlük" ("Great Turkish Dictionary"), the official dictionary of the Turkish language published by Turkish Language Association, contains 616,767 words, expressions, terms and nouns.
Longest word in Turkish
Not considering suffixes, the longest Turkish dictionary words have 20 letters: These are "kuyruksallayangiller" (the biological genus Motacillidae), "ademimerkeziyetçilik" (decentralization) and "elektroensefalografi" (electroencephalography). In comparison, the word "muvaffakiyet" has 12 letters, so it should be possible to use various other suffixes to make an even longer word from these ones.
Turkish language
About 40% of all speakers of Turkic languages are native Turkish speakers.The characteristic features of Turkish, such as vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family. The Turkic family comprises some 30 living languages spoken across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia.
UTF-8
The first 128 characters (US-ASCII) need one byte. The next 1,920 characters need two bytes to encode, which covers the remainder of almost all Latin-script alphabets, and also Greek, Cyrillic, Coptic, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Thaana and N'Ko alphabets, as well as Combining Diacritical Marks. Three bytes are needed for characters in the rest of the Basic Multilingual Plane, which contains virtually all characters in common use including most Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters. Four bytes are needed for characters in the other planes of Unicode, which include less common CJK characters, various historic scripts, mathematical symbols, and emoji (pictographic symbols).
İstiklal Marşı
The lyrics of the Turkish National Anthem consist of a long poem with 41 lines of verse. Only the first 8 lines (shown in bold) are performed in official ceremonies.
Turkish Language Association
The Turkish Language Institution (, TDK) is the official regulatory body of the Turkish language, founded on July 12, 1932 by the initiative of Atatürk and headquartered in Ankara, Turkey. The Institution acts as the official authority on the language (without any enforcement power), contributes to linguistic research on Turkish and other Turkic languages, and is charged with publishing the official dictionary of the language, "Güncel Türkçe Sözlük".
Turkmen alphabet
At the start of the 20th century, when Turkmen started to be written, it used the Arabic script, but in 1928 the Latin script was adopted. In 1940, the Russian influence in Soviet Turkmenistan prompted a switch to a Cyrillic alphabet, and a Turkmen Cyrillic alphabet (shown below in the table alongside the Latin) was created. When Turkmenistan became independent in 1991, President Saparmurat Niyazov immediately instigated a return to the Latin script. When it was reintroduced in 1993 it was supposed to use some unusual letters, such as the pound (£), dollar ($), yen (¥), and cent signs (¢), but these were replaced by more conventional letter symbols in 1999. The political and social forces that have combined to bring about these changes of script, then modifications of the Latin script, have been documented by Victoria Clement (2008).
Turkish vocabulary
With the advent of the Turkish Republic in 1923 came the attempt to unify the languages of the people and the administration, and to westernize the country. The modern Turkish alphabet, based on the Latin script, was introduced. Also, Arabic and Persian words were replaced, as possible, by:
Turkish words surviving in speech, obsolete Turkish words, new words formed regularly from the agglutinative resources of Turkish, thoroughly new words or formations. However, still a large portion of current Turkish words have Arabic or Persian origins.
Turkish has words borrowed from Greek due to the Ottoman Empire having conquered the Byzantine Empire. There are also borrowings from other European languages, or from the common technical vocabulary of Europe.
In the latter case, the borrowings are usually taken in their French pronunciation.
Uyghur language
The modified Arabic-derived writing system is the most common and the only standard in China, although other writing systems are used for auxiliary and historical purposes. Unlike most Arabic-derived scripts, the Uyghur Arabic alphabet has mandatory marking of all vowels due to modifications to the original Perso-Arabic script made in the 20th century. Two Latin and one Cyrillic alphabet are also used, though to a much lesser extent. The Arabic and Latin alphabets both have 32 characters.
Pan-Turkism
Some language communities have switched to the Latin alphabet, but the official Turkmen, Uzbek and Azerbaijani Latin alphabets are not as compatible with the Turkish alphabet as Turkey had hoped after a Pan-Turkic Alphabet with 35 letters had been agreed upon in the early 1990s prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. 
The Kazakh alphabets already include Latin ones, and Kazakhstan is planned to be fully converted to the Latin alphabet by 2025. Kyrgyzstan has not seriously considered adopting the Latin script, but the idea was entertained by some politicians during the country's first few years of independence, and Roman Kyrgyz alphabets exist.
Azerbaijani alphabet
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Azerbaijan gained its independence, one of the first laws passed in the new Parliament was the adoption of a new Latin-script alphabet.The Azerbaijani alphabet is the same as the Turkish alphabet, except for Әə, Xx, and Qq, the letters for sounds which do not exist as separate phonemes in Turkish. When compared to the historic Latin alphabet: Ğğ has replaced the historic Ƣƣ (which was represented in Cyrillic by the stroked Ғғ); the undotted Iı (also used in Turkish) has replaced the historic soft sign; the dotted İi (also used in Turkish) has replaced the historic soft-dotted Ii; Jj has replaced the historic Ƶƶ; Öö has replaced the historic Ɵɵ; Üü has replaced the historic Үy; and Yy has replaced the historic Jj.
Mustafa Necati
Up to 1928 the Arabic script was used in Turkey. However, the Turkish language has 8 vowels and the Arabic script remained incapable in reproducing the Turkish words. Nevertheless, being the script of Quran it was considered to be inalterable. But president Atatürk decided to adopt Latin alphabet (with small changes). Moreover, he insisted that the reform should be carried out immediately. In addition to adding the Latin alphabet to school curricula, short term courses for the adults called Nation's schools () were established. As the minister of National Education, Mustafa Necati was responsible for establishing these courses. The courses were successful and Necati was later considered to be one of the pioneers of the new Turkish alphabet.
Armenian cultural heritage in Turkey
As Bedross Der Matossian from Columbia University describes, for about 250 years, from the early 18th century until around 1950, more than 2000 books in the Turkish language were printed using the Armenian script. Not only did Armenians read Armeno-Turkish, but so did the non-Armenian (including the Ottoman Turkish) elite. The Armenian script was also used alongside the Arabic script on official documents of the Ottoman Empire written in Ottoman Turkish. For instance, the first novel to be written in the Ottoman Empire was Vartan Pasha's 1851 "Akabi Hikayesi", written in the Armenian script. Also, when the Armenian Duzian family managed the Ottoman mint during the reign of Abdülmecid I, they kept records in Armenian script, but in the Turkish language. From the end of the 19th-century, the Armenian alphabet was also used for books written in the Kurdish language in the Ottoman Empire.
Longest word in Turkish
As an agglutinative language, Turkish allows the construction of words by adding many suffixes to a word stem. The longest word in the Turkish language used in a text is ""muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine"" which has 70 letters. It is derived from the noun ""muvaffakiyet"" (success) and means "As though you are from those whom we may not be able to easily make into a maker of unsuccessful ones". It was used in a contrived story designed to use this word.
Atatürk's Reforms
Turkish had been written using a Turkish form of the Perso-Arabic script for a thousand years. It was well suited to write the Ottoman Turkish vocabulary that incorporated a great deal of Arabic and Persian vocabulary and even grammar. However, it was poorly suited for the core Turkish grammar and vocabulary, which was rich in vowels and poorly represented by Arabic script, an abjad which by definition only transcribed consonants. It was thus inadequate at representing Turkish phonemes. Some could be expressed using four different Arabic signs; others could not be expressed at all. The introduction of the telegraph and printing press in the 19th century exposed further weaknesses in the Arabic script.
Turkic peoples
The Turkic [[Old Turkic alphabet|runiform]] scripts, unlike other typologically close scripts of the world, do not have a uniform [[palaeography]] as, for example, have the [[Gothic language|Gothic]] runes, noted for the exceptional uniformity of its language and paleography. The Turkic alphabets are divided into four groups, the best known of them is the [[Orkhon script|Orkhon]] version of the Enisei group. The Orkhon script is the alphabet used by the [[Göktürk]]s from the 8th century to record the [[Old Turkic language]]. It was later used by the [[Uyghur Empire]]; a [[Yenisei]] variant is known from 9th-century [[Kyrgyz people|Kyrgyz]] inscriptions, and it has likely cousins in the [[Talas Valley]] of [[Turkestan]] and the [[Old Hungarian script]] of the 10th century.
Ottoman Turkish alphabet
In Turkish words, vowels are sometimes written using the vowel letters as the second letter of a syllable: "elif" for /a/; "ye" for /i/, /ɯ/; "vav" for /o/, /œ/, /u/, /y/; "he" for /a/, /e/. The corresponding "harakat" are there: "ustun" (Arabic "fatḥah") for /a/, /e/; "esre" (Arabic "kasrah") for /ɯ/, /i/; "ötre" (Arabic "ḍammah") for /o/, /œ/, /u/, /y/. The names of the "harakat" are also used for the corresponding vowels.
Old Turkic alphabet
This writing system was later used within the Uyghur Khaganate. Additionally, a Yenisei variant is known from 9th-century Yenisei Kirghiz inscriptions, and it has likely cousins in the Talas Valley of Turkestan and the Old Hungarian alphabet of the 10th century. Words were usually written from right to left.
Education in Turkey
On 1 November 1928 Law no 1353 introduced a new Latin-based alphabet was accepted. In 1931, the Turkish Association of History, and in 1932, the Turkish Language Association were established to protect Turkish from influences of foreign languages, improve it as science suggests and prevent misuse of the Turkish language.
Defective script
The Arabic alphabet has been adopted by many Muslim peoples to write their languages. In them, new consonant letters have been devised for sounds lacking in Arabic (e.g. , , , and in Persian; all the aspirate and retroflex stops in Sindhi). But rarely have the full set of vowels been represented in those new alphabets: Ottoman Turkish had eight vowels, but used only three letters to notate them. However, some adaptions of the Arabic alphabet do unambiguously mark all vowels: those for Bosnian, Kashmiri, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, and Uyghur.
Alphabet
The Armenian alphabet ( ' or ') is a graphically unique alphabetical writing system that has been used to write the Armenian language. It was introduced by Mesrob Mashdots around 405 AD, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader, and originally contained 36 letters. Two more letters, օ (o) and ֆ (f), were added in the Middle Ages. During the 1920s orthography reform, a new letter և (capital ԵՎ) was added, which was a ligature before ե+ւ, while the letter Ւ ւ was discarded and reintroduced as part of a new letter ՈՒ ու (which was a digraph before).
Turkish language
In Turkey, the regulatory body for Turkish is the Turkish Language Association ("Türk Dil Kurumu" or TDK), which was founded in 1932 under the name "Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti" ("Society for Research on the Turkish Language"). The Turkish Language Association was influenced by the ideology of linguistic purism: indeed one of its primary tasks was the replacement of loanwords and foreign grammatical constructions with equivalents of Turkish origin. These changes, together with the adoption of the new Turkish alphabet in 1928, shaped the modern Turkish language spoken today. TDK became an independent body in 1951, with the lifting of the requirement that it should be presided over by the Minister of Education. This status continued until August 1983, when it was again made into a governmental body in the constitution of 1982, following the military coup d'état of 1980.
Kazakh alphabets
The standard Windows keyboard layout used for Cyrillic Kazakh in Kazakhstan is a modification of the standard Russian keyboard, with characters found in Kazakh but not in Russian located on the number keys.
A number of Latin alphabets are in use to write the Kazakh language. A variant based on the Turkish alphabet is unofficially used by the Kazakh diaspora in Turkey and in Western countries and Kazakhstan. As with other Central Asian Turkic languages, a Latin alphabet was introduced by the Soviets and used from 1927 to 1940 when it was replaced with Cyrillic.
Turkish alphabet
Dotted and dotless I 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 does, with a dotted lowercase version, and a dotless uppercase version.
Ğ
In Turkish, the (sometimes represented with for convenience) is known as "yumuşak ge" (; 'soft g') and is the ninth letter of the Turkish alphabet. It always follows a vowel, and can be compared to the "blødt g" ('soft g') in Danish. The letter serves as a transition between two vowels, since they do not occur consecutively in native Turkish words (in loanwords they are separated by a glottal stop, e.g. "cemaat" or "cemaât", meaning 'community', from Arabic).