Turkish

About Turkish

Turkish is the official language of Turkey and one of the two official languages of Cyprus, with about 82 million native speakers. It is the largest of the Turkic languages, and standard Istanbul Turkish is understood wherever Turkish is spoken.

Turkish has two words for "you". Use siz with strangers, older people and in shops, and sen with friends, family and children. Most letters sound as they do in English, with a few exceptions: c sounds like the j in "jam", ç like the ch in "church" and ş like the sh in "shoe". The dotless ı is a different letter from i and sounds close to the a in "sofa". The soft ğ is not pronounced on its own but lengthens the vowel before it, so dağ (mountain) sounds like "daa". Stress usually falls on the last syllable.

FamilyTurkic, Oghuz branch
Native speakersabout 82 million (2021)
Second-language speakersabout 6 million (2021)
Official inTurkey, Cyprus
ScriptLatin alphabet, 29 letters, since 1928
Codestr (ISO 639-1), tur (ISO 639-3)

Speaker numbers: Ethnologue, 24th edition (2021), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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