Publisher's Synopsis
Turkish (ISO 639-3 tur) also referred to as Istanbul Turkish, is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with approximately 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). The Turkic family comprises some 30 living languages spoken across Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia. About 40% of all speakers of Turkic languages are native Turkish speakers. 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. The characteristic features of Turkish, such as vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family. After the foundation of the modern state of Turkey the Turkish Language Association (TDK) was established in 1932 under the patronage of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, with the aim of conducting research on Turkish. One of the tasks of the newly established association was to initiate a language reform to replace loanwords of Arabic and Persian origin with Turkish equivalents. By banning the usage of imported words in the press, the association succeeded in removing several hundred foreign words from the language. While most of the words introduced by the TDK were newly derived from Turkic roots, it also opted for reviving Old Turkish words which had not been used for centuries. The past few decades have seen the continuing work of the TDK to coin new Turkish words to express new concepts and technologies as they enter the language, mostly from English. Many of these new words, particularly information technology terms, have received widespread acceptance. However, the TDK is occasionally criticized for coining words which sound contrived and artificial. Many of the words derived by TDK coexist with their older counterparts. Turkey has the 13th largest GDP, well ahead of South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Saudi Arabia.Virtually all the Turkish people are Islamic. Less than 1% of the population is Christian. This dictionary contains 14.600 words in English and Turkish with parts of speech and definitions in English. It also contains a Turkish / English index. This dictionary is derived from our WordsRUs system. Turkish / Arabic, Turkish / Kurdish, Turkish / Italian and other language pairs are available, Visit our website at www.wordsrus.info for availability of the other volumes.
