Turkish languages have a past of approximately two thousand years. Today, as in history, Turkish languages and dialects are spoken over a very large geographic area extending almost from the shores of the Pacific Ocean in the east to the Baltic Sea shores in the west; from the Ice Sea in the north to Gulf of Basra in the south. Even though some of these languages and dialects are spoken in neighbouring areas, there are large distances between the areas of an important number of them. Because of this, it is understandable that there are important differences between Turkish languages and dialects spoken in the past and those of today. Nevertheless, it must be noted that these differences are not very numerous. They are all agglutinative and free of grammacitcal gender and conform to the rule of vowel harmony.

In history, there hasn't been another nation that has changed its alphabet as often as the Turks have. For example European languages have been and are still written in the Latin alphabet, Greek in the Greek alphabet, Slavic languages in the Cyrillic alphabet, Armenian in the Armenian alphabet. The Turkish language in contrast, has been written in five different alphabets, all independent of each other: Göktürk, Uygur, Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin. The reason why Turkish languages have been written in so many different alphabets might be due to the fact that Turkish people have spread over such a wide geographic area, as a result of migrations and conquest, and have consequently been part of many different civilisaitons, and been exposed to various religions and cultures. Even today, Turkish languages are written in three different alphabets: Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic! Isn't all that something to celebrate?

Pınar Aka (Graduate Student, EDEB)