- A member of the Altaic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages. The official language of Turkey and of Turkish north Cyprus; a minority language in Bulgaria, Greece, and Macedonia (and other territories of the former Ottoman Empire). An important language of immigration in Germany and in large cities of France, the Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. Characteristics of Turkish, shared with other Uralic and Altaic languages, are such features as: vowel harmony and agglutination; the addition to verb stems of suffixes to denote, amongst other meanings, passive, reflexive, and causative aspects; the use of postpositions instead of prepositions; and an absence of definite articles and of grammatical gender. Formerly written using the Arabic script, since 1928 Turkish has used a modified form of the Roman alphabet.