| Cypriot Turkish | |
| Nativename: | Turkish: Kıbrıs Türkçesi |
| States: | Cyprus (island) |
| Region: | Cyprus and Turkish Cypriot diaspora |
| Familycolor: | Altaic |
| Fam1: | Turkic |
| Fam2: | Common Turkic |
| Fam3: | Oghuz |
| Fam4: | Western Oghuz |
| Fam5: | Turkish |
| Script: | no formal writing (Cypriot people write in Istanbul Turkish) |
| Isoexception: | dialect |
| Glotto: | cypr1251 |
| Ietf: | tr-CY |
| Notice: | IPA |
| Agency: | unregulated (Istanbul Turkish is used in education, broadcast and legal matters) |
| Ethnicity: | Turkish Cypriots |
Cypriot Turkish (Kıbrıs Türkçesi) is a dialect of the Turkish language spoken by Turkish Cypriots both in Cyprus and among its diaspora.
Emanating from Anatolia 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.[1] It is understood by expatriate Cypriots living in the UK, United States, Australia and other parts of the world.
Cypriot Turkish consists of a blend of Ottoman Turkish and the Yörük dialect that is spoken in the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey. In addition, it has absorbed influences from Greek, Italian and English. Cypriot Turkish is mutually intelligible with Standard Turkish.
Since the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Turkish is found almost exclusively in Northern Cyprus, with approximately 300,000 native Turkish speakers (including all dialects of Turkish) as of 2016 and 1,400 speakers in the south as of 2013.[2] Of these, a significant number are immigrants from Turkey who do not speak the Cypriot variety of Turkish. Cypriot Turkish is not used officially in the north, where modern standard Turkish became the de facto official language of schools, government, and the media.[3]
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:
Standard Turkish Turkish: taş ↔ Cypriot Turkish Turkish: daş "stone"
Standard Turkish Turkish: kurt ↔ Cypriot Turkish Turkish: gurt "wolf"
Standard Turkish Turkish: patates ↔ Cypriot Turkish Turkish: badadez "potato"
Standard Turkish Turkish: nasılsın? ↔ Cypriot Turkish Turkish: nasılsıŋ? "how are you?"
Standard Turkish Turkish: bin ↔ Cypriot Turkish Turkish: biŋ "thousand"
Standard Turkish: Turkish: Arabaya binmek ↔ Cypriot Turkish: Turkish: Arabaya biŋmek "getting in the car"
Standard Turkish Turkish: isteriz ↔ Cypriot Turkish Turkish: isderik "we want"
Standard Turkish: Turkish: bakla ↔ Cypriot Turkish: Turkish: pakla "broad beans"
Standard Turkish Turkish: hiç ↔ Cypriot Turkish Turkish: hiş "no, none"
The last two alternations are more specific to Cypriot Turkish and are seen less often in other Turkish vernacular.
Cypriot Turkish consonants are mostly the same as standard Turkish consonants. However, Cypriot Turkish has retained the phonemes pronounced as //ŋ// and pronounced as //ɣ//, whereas standard Turkish lost them.
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | pronounced as /p/ | pronounced as /b/ | pronounced as /t̪/ | pronounced as /d̪/ | pronounced as /c/ | pronounced as /ɟ/ | pronounced as /k/ | pronounced as /ɡ/ | |||
| Affricate | pronounced as /tʃ/ | pronounced as /dʒ/ | |||||||||
| Fricative | pronounced as /f/ | pronounced as /v/ | pronounced as /s̟/ | pronounced as /z̟/ | pronounced as /ʃ/ | pronounced as /ʒ/ | pronounced as /ɣ/ | pronounced as /h/ | |||
| Nasal | pronounced as /m/ | pronounced as /n/ | pronounced as /ŋ/ | ||||||||
| Flap/Tap | pronounced as /ɾ/ | ||||||||||
| Lateral | pronounced as /l/ | pronounced as /ɫ/ | |||||||||
| Semivowel | pronounced as /j/ | ||||||||||
| front | back | |||
| unrounded | rounded | unrounded | rounded | |
| high | pronounced as /i/ (i) | pronounced as /y/ (ü) | pronounced as /ɯ/ (ı) | pronounced as /u/ (u) |
| mid/low | pronounced as /ɛ/ (e) | pronounced as /ø/ (ö) | pronounced as /ɑ/ (a) | pronounced as /o/ (o) |
Cypriot Turkish is structured as a VO language as opposed to standard Turkish which is an OV language. It is very typical in forming a question.
Cypriot Turkish uses the aorist tense instead of the present continuous tense, and very often in place of the future tense as well.
Cypriot Turkish does not use the narrative/indefinite past, and only uses the simple past instead.
Cypriot Turkish also lacks the question suffix of Turkish: mi.[4] This is similar to colloquial Azerbaijani.
In Cypriot Turkish, the reflexive pronoun in third person is different, namely Turkish: geŋni ("him, himself, them, themself"). In Standard Turkish, this would be Turkish: kendisi.
Typical question usually do not qualify as standard Turkish questions (see the example above) because question suffixes are usually dropped by native Turkish Cypriots. Another subtle difference is the emphasis on verbs.