The Turkish language is a Turkic language in the Altaic group. Along with being spoken in Turkey (where it is also the official language), the language is also spoken in Cyprus (where it one of the official languages), the Middle East, as well as parts of Europe. There are approximately 90 millions Turkish speakers between native and second language speakers.

Modern Turkish descends from the Ottoman empire, but has undergone many changes to become the language it is today. The earliest form of Turkish appeared in the Orkhon inscriptions, which are the oldest known written records of the Turkic languages, dating back to the 8th century. These texts were written in the Old Turkic script and were used by the Göktürks and other early Turkic states. 

Old Turkish gave way to Middle Turkish. As early as 900, Turkish was written in Arabic script due to the influence of Arabic script languages. As the Turkic-speaking people spread across Central Asia, the language underwent significant changes. During the Seljuk Empire (11th–13th centuries) and the rise of the Ottoman Empire (14th century), the Turkish language absorbed vocabulary from Persian and Arabic due to the influence of Persian culture and Islam And became Ottoman Turkish (15th–19th century), which was the language of the Ottoman Empire, heavily influenced by Persian and Arabic. The vocabulary and syntax became complex, with many loanwords, making it significantly different from modern Turkish. 

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk initiated language reforms (such as replacing the Arabic script with Latin in 1928) in the 1920s and 1930s to simplify and purify the language, removing many Persian and Arabic loanwords and replacing them with words of Turkic origin. This effort led to the establishment of the Turkish Language Association (TDK) and the adoption of a new, more phonetic alphabet in 1928, based on the Latin script.