🇹🇷 What Language Do They Speak in Turkey?
The short answer
Turkey speaks Turkish, the mother tongue of the vast majority of its 85 million people. Kurdish (mainly Kurmanji) is the largest minority language, spoken in the southeast, alongside Arabic, Zazaki and others.
Worth knowing
- ●Turkish switched from Arabic script to the Latin alphabet in 1928 — one of history's fastest writing reforms
- ●Vowel harmony makes Turkish words 'rhyme internally' — suffixes change their vowels to match the root
- ●Turkish is agglutinative: 'Evlerinizden' means 'from your houses' — one word, four building blocks
Going to Turkey? Say your first words before you land.
Yap gives you a real 30-second spoken conversation in Turkish every day — role-play the café, the taxi and the market with an AI tutor that listens and gently corrects. Four weeks of that beats any phrasebook.