The Turkish language
and how it is written

Where Turkish ranks

Turkish is the 21st most-spoken language in the world by total speakers ^[1,2]. Here it is among its neighbours in the ranking, on one scale.

“How are you?” in Turkish

The design of Latin alphabet

An alphabet: separate letters for consonants and vowels, written left to right. The Romans took it from a Greek alphabet by way of the Etruscans^[5], and it is now the most widely used script in the world^[6]. Most languages that use it add marks or extra letters for their own sounds^[4].

Alphabet. One letter for each consonant and vowel.

Kind

Alphabet

Direction

Left to right

Took shape

By the 7th century BCE in central Italy

Line of descent

Egyptian hieroglyphs → Proto-Sinaitic → Phoenician → Greek → Etruscan → Latin

Traditional surface

Parchment and vellum

Own digits

No — uses the Western 0–9

Also writes

English Englishespañol Spanishfrançais Frenchportuguês PortugueseBahasa Indonesia IndonesianDeutsch GermanNaijá Nigerian PidginTiếng Việt VietnameseKiswahili SwahiliHausa HausaTagalog Tagalog (Filipino)ꦧꦱꦗꦮ Javaneseitaliano ItalianYorùbá Yoruba

• Two alphabets in one

  Capitals come from the square capitals the Romans carved in stone^[7]; small letters come from Carolingian minuscule, a rounded book hand standardised in Charlemagne's empire in the late 8th century^[8]. Writing with both is called case, and software has to know which pairs belong together^[4].

• Built to be extended

  Rather than inventing new letters, most languages bolt marks onto old ones: é, ñ, ç, ş, ọ. Unicode encodes many as single letters and also as a base letter plus a combining mark, so the same word can be stored two ways^[4].

• Gothic or roman

  Through the Middle Ages much of Europe wrote and printed in blackletter. German kept its Fraktur style for everyday print far longer than its neighbours, until the 20th century^[9].

• Four i's

  Turkish distinguishes dotted İ/i from dotless I/ı, so the uppercase of i is İ, not I. Software that capitalises text without knowing the language turns 'istanbul' into the wrong word; Unicode documents the special case^[4].

• One sound, one letter

  The 1928 alphabet was designed so each letter has one sound, with ç, ş, ğ, ö and ü for sounds the Arabic script wrote poorly^[3].

Explore the letters

Turkish's relatives among the 38

Turkish belongs to the Turkic family (Oghuz). These are the other languages with 50 million or more speakers in the same family; the closest — in the same branch — come first.

No other language among the 38 belongs to the Turkic family.

Turkish across the hub

The main page compares all 38 languages. Each link opens it on Turkish.

• Preview it in the explorer →with all 38 side by side
• Hear it in the voice tour →“How are you?” in every language, spoken in turn
• Trace its script's family tree →from the first alphabets and Chinese oracle bones
• Compare its digits →ten ways to write 0–9
• See its share of speakers →an interactive breakdown by script, family and region

Sources

1. Ethnologue — What are the top 200 most spoken languages? (2026)
2. Wikipedia — List of languages by total number of speakers (Ethnologue 2026 figures, retrieved October 2026)
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Turkish language
4. The Unicode Standard 17.0, chapter 7: Europe-I (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic)
5. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Alphabet (writing)
6. Omniglot — Latin alphabet
7. Omniglot — Classical Latin alphabet
8. Omniglot — Carolingian minuscule
9. Omniglot — Fraktur
10. Omniglot — Phoenician alphabet
11. Omniglot — Useful phrases in Turkish

Checked October 25, 2026. Speaker numbers are Ethnologue's 2026 estimates, which count each language separately (Arabic and Chinese varieties are listed one by one). Maps shade whole countries, not regions within them. Found an error? Tell us.