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Learn Turkish
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Learn Turkish Pronunciation

You are about to start the study of the Turkish language. Whatever your motivation for doing so, you will get greater enjoyment and satisfaction from your study if you will cooperate fully with the instructional systen, embodied in this course. This introduction is intended to acquaint you with the book and with the method advocated for its utilization.

The Language of this manual

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 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 similar 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 72,000,000, 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, Armeftian, 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 numbers 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 on the Volga.

The Language of this Course

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 Intent and Structure of this Course

Although you will learn to read and write Turkish as you progress in this course, you will not have any formal instruction in writing,and reading of longer texts will be introduced gradually. This is because the essential skills required are to speak and to understand spoken Turkish. The writing system of Turkish is quite easy to master and fairly closely represents Turkish speech.