The native Turkish of Turkey has evolved from the southwestern branch of the Turkish language group in the Ural-Altaic language family. Among approximately 4000 languages spoken across the world today, Turkey is the seventh most widely spoken language with over two hundred million native Turkish speakers.

While Turks utilized a number of written languages since the 8th century, the Gok Turk, Uygur, Arabic and Latin alphabets have been used most widely. Once the Republic was declared and national unity achieved in 1923, the determination of the national alphabet acquired a high priority until 1928 when it was subjected to reform. Convinced that the adoption of Western culture would propel Turkey to the level of contemporary civilization, the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, enabled the adoption of a version of the Latin alphabet modified according to the sound system of Turkish and scrapped the Arabic alphabet.

Like a number of other languages, Turkey is currently heavily influenced by English.