U.S. Foreign Service Institute
      Turkish Language Programs

Overview of the Turkish Basic Course

The Turkish Basic Course is an introduction to spoken Turkish in that it includes the major patterns of simple sentences and vocabulary of about 475 high frequency items. It provides a basis for communicating with Asian Turks as a far east as Sinkiang Province in China and as far west at the Tatar regions on the Volga. The course enables students to communicate in all but the most isolated Kurdish villages. Each unit begins with a dialogue between two or more speakers. Many of the units also include variation and lexical drills, questions for discussion, notes, grammar and vocabulary drills, and narratives.

The Turkish presented in this course is representative of the 'standard' speech of educated Turks in the cities and towns of Turkey. As in any country where communication has been poor until recently, in Turkey too there is considerable local variation in pronunciation and vocabulary. However, in schools all over Turkey the language you are about to learn is used and taught as the national standard and, if you learn it well, you will be speaking a tongue which has prestige throughout the country and which is understood everywhere. You may even have the experience of being told by Turks 'you speak better Turkish than I', a compliment which you should discount heavily.

The Turkish Language

Turkish is the principal language of the Republic of Turkey. It is a member, along with the related languages of Iranian and Soviet Azerbaijan and of various areas within the former Soviet Union, mainly in Asia, of the Turkic group of the Altaic branch of the Uralic-Altaic language family. This Altaic branch also includes many other languages, mainly those grouped under the headings 'Mongol' and 'Manchu'.

The Turkic languages are remarkably similiar in structure and even in vocabulary, at least as closely related to one another as, say, the Romance group of Indo-European languages.

The population of the Republic of Turkey is about 66,000,000 , of whom the great majority are native speakers of Turkish, making Turkish by a considerable margin the largest language of the Turkic family. Among the remainder of the population of Turkey - native speakers of Kurdish, Laz, Circassian, Arabic, Greek, Armenian, Syriac and other languages - the great majority, at least of the men, have some acquaintance with Turkish. Thus this language will serve the student for communication in all parts of Turkey save the most isolated Kurdish village. In addition, substantial nubmers of Turkish speakers are to be found in parts of Syria, Lebanon, Greece and Cyprus. Turkish can serve the student also as an introduction to the Turkic language family and provide him with a basis for establishing communication with Asian Turkic speakers as far east as Sinkiang Province in China and as far west as the Tatar regions of the Volga.