Going on a beach or sightseeing vacation in popular Turkey, Russian tourists have not thought about communication problems for a long time. Despite the fact that the official language in Turkey is Turkish, the locals at the resorts have not only mastered English with German, but also speak Russian quite tolerably.
Some statistics and facts
- Despite the significant number of languages represented in Turkey, at least 80% of its population or 60 million people speak only Turkish.
- The remaining 20% of the country's inhabitants communicate in almost fifty dialects and dialects, with Sever Kurdish being recognized as the most popular among them.
- Only 17% of the population speaks English, but this is quite enough to run the tourism business at a sufficiently high level.
- Every hundredth Turk speaks Russian.
- Turkish is also widely spoken in the northern part of the island of Cyprus, where more than 170 thousand inhabitants consider it to be their native language.
Turkish: history and modernity
Turks are very sensitive to their own state language. In Turkey, according to the Constitution, only Turkish education can be conducted in schools and universities, and foreign ones are studied in accordance with the rules established by the state.
Turkish belongs to the Turkic branch of the Altai language family. Experts consider the language of the Gagauz people living in Moldova and Romania to be the most lexically and phonetically close to Turkish. It is a bit similar to Turkish and Azerbaijani languages, and in Turkmen, linguists find some phonetic and grammatical similarities. Among all the diverse Turkish dialects, the Istanbul version is adopted as the basis of the literary language.
Over the past couple of centuries, Turkish has been heavily influenced by the Persian and Arabic languages, and as a result has been enriched with a large number of borrowings. In the first third of the twentieth century, the Turks began a struggle for the purity of the language and the process of cleansing it from foreign words continues to this day. It is curious, but in Turkish there are also borrowings from the Russian language, for example, the word "/>
Tourist notes
Few people know English and Russian in far from the resort areas of Turkey, and therefore for independent travel it is worth stocking up on a Russian-Turkish phrasebook. In the same place where the main tourist routes are laid, menus in restaurants, maps and other important information for the traveler are guaranteed to be translated into English, and often into Russian.
