TURKISH TRANSLATION NOTES
The Turkish language is spoken by approximately 65 million people in Turkey. Turkish is the most widely spoken member of the Turkic language family, a group which also includes Azeri (Azerbaijani). Turkish is spoken in Turkey, parts of Cyprus, and by scattered communities throughout the rest of the world, especially in western Europe.
The language was originally introduced into Anatolia by the Seljuq Turks in the late 11th century AD. Old Turkish absorbed a great many Arabic and Persian words and grammatical forms (largely because the teachers of Islam in the Seljuq empire were Persians), and was written in Arabic script. After the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 the government reformed the language and replaced the Arabic script with the Roman alphabet (1928). Modern Turkish is therefore written using the Roman alphabet.
