Turkish is a historically rooted and culturally significant language that has developed through several major stages. The earliest written records of the language appear in the 8th-century Orhun Yazıtları (Orkhon Inscriptions), which reflect the political, social, and cultural life of early Turkic communities. The Middle Turkic period (13th–15th centuries) encompasses a diverse literary tradition, including Uighur, Khwarezm, and Chagatai texts. From the 15th century until the early 20th century, Ottoman Turkish served as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire.
Modern Turkish emerged through a series of language reforms introduced in the early Republican period, most notably the adoption of the Latin-based alphabet on 1 November 1928, which greatly increased accessibility, standardization, and literacy. Modern Turkish continues to evolve in parallel with contemporary cultural and technological developments.
From a typological perspective, Turkish belongs to the Turkic language family, a classification used in modern linguistics to describe a group of languages sharing historical connections and structural affinities. Turkish exhibits hallmark features such as vowel harmony, agglutinative morphology, SOV (subject–object–verb) word order, productive derivation, and regular phonological processes. It is closely related to other Turkic languages, including Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tatar. Turkish is spoken primarily in Türkiye and holds cultural and historical significance across regions shaped by Turkic-speaking communities.
