Cypriot Turkish, known locally as Kıbrıs Türkçesi, is a Turkish dialect spoken by Turkish Cypriots

Turkish Cypriots

Turkish Cypriots are the ethnic Turks and members of the Turkish-speaking ethnolinguistic community of the Eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus. The term is used to refer explicitly to the indigenous Turkish Cypriots, whose Ottoman Turkish forbears colonised the island in 1571...

.

History

Cypriot Turkish is the vernacular spoken by Turkish Cypriots

Turkish Cypriots

Turkish Cypriots are the ethnic Turks and members of the Turkish-speaking ethnolinguistic community of the Eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus. The term is used to refer explicitly to the indigenous Turkish Cypriots, whose Ottoman Turkish forbears colonised the island in 1571...

 both in Cyprus and among its diaspora

Turkish Cypriot diaspora

The Turkish Cypriot diaspora is a term used to refer to the Turkish Cypriot community living outside the island of Cyprus.-History:In 1914, Britain annexed the island of Cyprus when the Ottomans joined World War I against the Allied Forces...

.

Emanating from Anatolia

Anatolia

Anatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...

 and evolved for four centuries, Cypriot Turkish is the vernacular spoken by Cypriots with Ottoman ancestry, as well as by Cypriots who converted to Islam during Ottoman rule. It is understood by expatriate Cypriots

Cyprus

Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

 living in the UK, U.S.

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 and other parts of the world.

Cypriot Turkish consists of a blend of Ottoman Turkish

Ottoman Turkish language

The Ottoman Turkish language or Ottoman language is the variety of the Turkish language that was used for administrative and literary purposes in the Ottoman Empire. It borrows extensively from Arabic and Persian, and was written in a variant of the Perso-Arabic script...

 and the Yörük

Yörük

The Yorouks, also Yuruks or Yörüks are immigrants, ultimately of Thracian descent,some of whom are still nomadic, primarily inhabiting the mountains of Anatolia and partly Balkan peninsula...

 dialect spoken to this day in the Taurus Mountains

Taurus Mountains

Taurus Mountains are a mountain complex in southern Turkey, dividing the Mediterranean coastal region of southern Turkey from the central Anatolian Plateau. The system extends along a curve from Lake Eğirdir in the west to the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the east...

 of southern Turkey

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

. In addition it has absorbed influences from Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

, Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

 and English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

.

Differences between standard Turkish and Cypriot Turkish

Cypriot Turkish is distinguished by a number of sound alternations not found in standard Turkish, but some of which are also quite common in other Turkish vernaculars:

• Voicing of some unvoiced stops
  Stop consonant
  In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...
  
  
  • t↔d, k↔g

Standard Turkish kurt ↔ Cypriot Turkish gurt "worm"

Standard Turkish taş ↔ Cypriot Turkish daş "stone"

• Preservation of earlier Turkic
  Turkic languages
  The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
  
   *ŋ

Standard Turkish son ↔ Cypriot Turkish soñ "end, last"

Standard Turkish bin ↔ Cypriot Turkish biñ "thousand"

• Changing 1st person plural suffix
  • z↔k

Standard Turkish isteriz ↔ Cypriot Turkish isterik "we want"

• Unvoicing of some voiced stops
  Stop consonant
  In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...
  
  
  • b↔p

Standard Turkish Kıbrıs ↔ Cypriot Turkish Kıprıs "Cyprus

Cyprus

Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

"

• Lenition
  Lenition
  In linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" . Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically...
  
   of final affricates
  • ç ([tʃ]) ↔ ş ([ʃ])

Standard Turkish hiç ↔ Cypriot Turkish hiş "no, none"

The last two alternations are more specific to Cypriot Turkish.

Consonants

Consonant phonemes

	Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...		Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...		Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...		Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....		Uvular Uvular consonant Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and...		Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
Plosive Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...	p	b	t̪	d̪			k	ɡ	q	ɢ
Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :...					tʃ	dʒ
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...	f	v	s̟	z̟	ʃ		x	ɣ			h
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	m		n				ŋ
Flap/Tap Flap consonant In phonetics, a flap or tap is a type of consonantal sound, which is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator is thrown against another.-Contrast with stops and trills:...			r
Lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth....			l
Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...					j

Vowels

	front		central		back
	unrounded	rounded	unrounded	rounded	unrounded	rounded
high	i	y (ü)			ɯ (ı)	u
mid	e	œ (ö)				o
low	æ (e)		ɑ̟

Grammar

Cypriot Turkish is structured as VO language

VO language

In linguistics, a VO language is a language in which the verb typically comes before the object.Winfred P. Lehmann first proposed to reduce the six possible permutations of word order to just two main ones, VO and OV, in what he calls the Fundamental Principle of Placement , arguing that the...

 as oppose to standard Turkish which is OV language

OV language

In linguistics, an OV language is a language in which the object comes before the verb. They are primarily left-branching, or head-final, i.e. heads are often found at the end of their phrases, with a resulting tendency to have the adjectives before nouns, to place adpositions as postpositions...

. It is very typical in forming a question.

• Standard Turkish "Okula gidecek misin?" is, in Cypriot Turkish, "Gideceñ okula?" (Will you go to school?)

Cypriot Turkish also lacks the question suffix of "mi".

• Standard Turkish "Annen evde mi?" is, in Cypriot Turkish, "Annen evdedir?" (Is your mother at home?)

In Cypriot Turkish, the reflexive pronoun in third person is different, namely "genni" (him, himself, them, themself). In Standard Turkish, kendisini.

Semantics

Typical question sentences most of the time do not qualify as a standard Turkish question. See the example above.
This is due to the fact that question suffixes are most of the time dropped by native Turkish Cypriots.

Another subtle difference is the emphasis on verbs.

External links

• List of Cypriot Turkish Vocabulary (in Turkish)
• Turkish Cypriot Idioms Search Engine