How many characters are in the Turkish alphabet?
201417#0
The Turkish alphabet () is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which (Ç, Ş, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. This alphabet represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy and specificity. It is the current official alphabet and the latest in a series of distinct alphabets used in different eras.
Turkish alphabet
201417#16
The current 29-letter Turkish alphabet was established as a personal initiative of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It was a key step in the cultural part of Atatürk's Reforms, introduced following his consolidation of power. Having established a one-party state ruled by his Republican People's Party, Atatürk was able to sweep aside the previous opposition to implementing radical reform of the alphabet. He announced his plans in July 1928 and established a Language Commission () consisting of the following members:
Turkish alphabet
1329090#60
In the spring of 1928, Atatürk met in Ankara with several linguists and professors from all over Turkey where he unveiled to them a plan of his to implement a new alphabet for the written Turkish language based on a modified Latin alphabet. The new Turkish alphabet would serve as a replacement for the old Arabic script and as a solution to the literacy problem in Turkey, as the Arabic script does not feature any vowels while the Turkish language has eight. When he asked them at how long it would take, in their professional opinion, to implement the new alphabet into the Turkish language, most of the professors and linguists said between three and five years. Atatürk was said to have scoffed and openly stated, "We shall do it in three to five months".
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
427993#0
ISO/IEC 8859-9:1999, "Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 9: Latin alphabet No. 5", is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in 1989. It is informally referred to as Latin-5 or "Turkish". It was designed to cover the Turkish language, designed as being of more use than the ISO/IEC 8859-3 encoding. It is identical to ISO/IEC 8859-1 except for these six replacements of Icelandic characters with characters unique to the Turkish alphabet:
ISO-8859-9 is the IANA preferred charset name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429. In modern applications Unicode and UTF-8 are preferred. 0.1% of all web pages use ISO-8859-9 in February 2016.
ISO/IEC 8859-9
29992#67
Turkish is written using a Latin alphabet introduced in 1928 by Atatürk to replace the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, a version of Perso-Arabic alphabet. The Ottoman alphabet marked only three different vowels—long "ā, ū" and "ī"—and included several redundant consonants, such as variants of "z" (which were distinguished in Arabic but not in Turkish). The omission of short vowels in the Arabic script was claimed to make it particularly unsuitable for Turkish, which has eight vowels.
Turkish language
23690734#15
For about 250 years, from the early 18th century until around 1950, more than 2,000 books in the Turkish language were printed using the Armenian alphabet. Not only did Armenians read this Turkish in Armenian script, so did the non-Armenian (including the Ottoman Turkish) elite. An American correspondent in Marash in 1864 calls the alphabet "Armeno-Turkish", describing it as consisting of 31 Armenian letters and "infinitely superior" to the Arabic or Greek alphabets for rendering Turkish. This Armenian script was used alongside the Arabic script on official documents of the Ottoman Empire written in Ottoman Turkish. For instance, the first novel to be written in Turkish in the Ottoman Empire was Vartan Pasha's 1851 "Akabi Hikayesi", written in the Armenian script. When the Armenian Duzian family managed the Ottoman mint during the reign of Abdülmecid I, they kept records in Armenian script but in the Turkish language. From the middle of the 19th century, the Armenian alphabet was also used for books written in the Kurdish language in the Ottoman Empire.
Armenian alphabet
5313496#9
The Latin script was introduced after the Russian Revolution of 1917 in order to facilitate an increase in literacy and distance the language from Islamic influence. Only lowercase letters were found in the first versions of the Latin variant, between 1926-9. A slightly different version used by Jews speaking the Bukhori dialect, who included three extra characters for phonemes not found in the other dialects: , , and . (Note that and are switched relative to their usage in the Turkish alphabet, which has formed the basis for other Latin scripts in the former Soviet Union.)
The unusual character is called "Gha" and represents the phoneme . The character is found in the Common Turkic Alphabet in which most non-Slavic languages of the Soviet Union were written until the late 1930s. The Latin alphabet is not used today, although its adoption is advocated by certain groups.
Tajik alphabet
29992#28
The vowels of the Turkish language are, in their alphabetical order, , , , , , , , . The Turkish vowel system can be considered as being three-dimensional, where vowels are characterised by how and where they are articulated focusing on three key features: front and back, rounded and unrounded and vowel height. Vowels are classified [±back], [±round] and [±high].
Turkish language
1329090#61
Over the next several months, Atatürk pressed for the introduction of the new Turkish alphabet as well as made public announcements to the upcoming overhaul of the new alphabet. On 1 November 1928 he introduced the new Turkish alphabet and abolished the use of Arabic script. At the time, literate citizens of the country comprised as little as 10% of the population. Dewey told Atatürk that learning how to read and write in Turkish with the Arabic script took roughly three years with rather strenuous methods at the elementary level. They used the Ottoman Language written in the Arabic script with Arabic and Persian loan vocabulary. The creation of the new Turkish alphabet as a variant of the Latin alphabet was undertaken by the "Language Commission" () with the initiative of Atatürk. The tutelage was received from an Ottoman-Armenian scientist Hagop Dilaçar. The first Turkish newspaper using the new alphabet was published on 15 December 1928. Atatürk himself travelled the countryside in order to teach citizens the new alphabet. After vigorous campaigns, the literacy rate increased from 10.6% in 1927 to 22.4% in 1940. A number of congresses were organized on scientific issues, education, history, economics, arts and language. Libraries were systematically developed, mobile libraries and book transport systems were set up to serve districts and remote places. Literacy reform was also supported by strengthening the private publishing sector with a new law on copyrights.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
1230576#6
The Turkish government finally legalized the letters Q, W, and X as part of the Turkish alphabet in 2013.
Kurdish alphabets