Turkish is the national language of Turkey, and is also spoken by minority groups in Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria and other countries. It is the most important member of the Turkic group of languages which form a branch of the Altaic family. There are about 50 million speakers.

Turkish was originally written in the Arabic script which, although poorly suited for the language, had been in use since the conversion of the Turks to Islam. In 1928 President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk decreed the introduction of a slightly modified version of the Roman alphabet, consisting of 21 consonants and 8 vowels.

The Turkish vowels are divided into the so-called front vowels ,e,I,ö,ü and the back vowels a, I (undotted I), o, u. The dotted I retains the dot even when capitalized. As in all the Altaic languages, most Turkish words adhere to the principal of vowel harmony-that is, all the vowels in a given word belong to the same class (front or back), and any suffixes added generally contain vowels of the same class. Thus the plural of a noun with a front vowel or vowels is formed with the suffix -ler. (ev house, evler houses), while the plural of a noun with back vowels is formed with the suffix -lar. (at horse atlar horses)

As an agglutinative language, Turkish frequently adds on suffix after suffix, thus producing words that may be the equivalent of a whole sentence or phrase in English.

To the untrained ear, Turkish bears a close resemblance to Russian when spoken, since it contains many of the same sounds. The one sound that is oddly contained in both is the I (indotted I) which has the sound of "uh" pronounced back in the throat, similar to the I in Bill.