Turkish (Türk dili) is a member of
Turkic family of
languages, a subclass of the Ural-Altaic languages (
Uralic languages,
Altaic languages). Thus, such living languages as Mongolian (an Altaic language), Hungarian and Finnish (Uralic languages) are possibly distant relatives of Turkish. Although the languages of other Turkic countries (former
Soviet republics) are quite similar to Turkish (especially those of Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan), there are many major differences in pronunication, grammar, and vocabulary. The languages used by former Central Asian people (e.g., Huns) are assumed to be considerably close to today's Turkic languages.
The characteristic features of Turkish are the vowel harmony (if the first vowel of a Turkish word is a front vowel, the second and other vowels of the same word are usually the same vowel or another front vowel; e.g. Erdem), the abundance of suffixes (and very few prefixes), and a word order that is the opposite of that in English and other Indo-European languages). Turkish, like Finnish, is an agglutinative language.
See also: Turkish alphabet