Turkish language
Turkish (Türk dili) is a member of Turkic family of languages, often considered a subclass of the Altaic languages. Thus Mongolian is possibly related to Turkish. Although the languages of other Turkic countries (former Soviet republics) are quite similar to Turkish (especially those of Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan), there are many major differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. The Turkish used in countries such as Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, the Republic of Macedonia, Rumania and Uzbekistan is also called Osmanli.The characteristic features of Turkish are the vowel harmony (if the first vowel of a Turkish word is a front vowel, the second and other vowels of the same word are usually the same vowel or another front vowel; e.g. Erdem), the abundance of suffixes (and very few prefixes), and a word order that is the opposite of that in English and other Indo-European languages). Turkish, like Finnish, is an agglutinative language.
See also: Turkish alphabet
