Ottoman and Turkish Language Study

Merhaba! The Ottoman and Turkish Studies Program at Harvard University offers Turkish and Ottoman language courses at all levels, as well as other courses on Turkish culture and literature. All language courses of the program are open as electives to students from all faculties. Students completing four half-courses of Turkish language courses beyond the first-year level and/or half-courses taught primarily in Turkish can receive printed citations along with their diplomas. To learn more on Citations in Foreign Languages click here.

An undergraduate degree in the Turkish program may be obtained in combination with other programs. Undergraduate students with advanced standing have the option of applying for a joint A.B./A.M. degree. All concentrators must complete at least four semesters of a departmental language. To further this goal, as well as to provide prolonged exposure to the civilizations of the region, the Department encourages a junior year abroad in Turkey, provided that course work completed abroad falls within the concentration and is approved by the student's advisor.

Turkey Turkish, a member of the Turkic subdivision of the Altaic language family and the successor of Ottoman-Turkish, is a so-called agglutinative language. That is, several suffixes can be attached to words and some words may have meanings that would correspond to long sentences in English. Hence, putting the suffixes into the right order is one of the difficulties for learners. The good news: There is neither gender nor definite articles in Turkish! An English speaker would be able to recognize a remarkable number of words borrowed from French and English. Another characteristic of Turkish is its vowel harmony. Generally, the vowels of a word must be either back or front, and the vowels of suffixes attached to them usually adjust themselves.

Ottoman Turkish was written with the Arabic script. Changing the Arabic script was a much discussed issue in the second half of the 19th century. The change to the Latin alphabet came in 1928 along with many other reforms in Turkey.

Today, the standard high Turkish is referred to as Istanbul Türkçesi, or, Istanbul Turkish. Turkish is spoken by the natives of Turkey as a mother tongue (~60 million people), and a significant number of Turks living outside of Turkey (Cyprus, Balkans, Europe). Other modern Turkic languages have many common features with Turkey Turkish, be it in grammar or lexically. Especially Gagauz (spoken in Moldova), Azeri (spoken in Azerbaijan), and Turkmen (spoken in Iraq, Iran, Turkmenistan) are close to Turkey Turkish. The mastery of Turkey Turkish is certainly a key to learning other Turkic languages as well.



Basic Turkish is a two-year program that comprises Elementary Turkish (a full-year course; indivisible for credit) and Intermediate Turkish 120a (Fall) and 120b (Spring). To attend intermediate Turkish students have to successfully complete Elementary Turkish or equivalent, this is also the minimum requirement to be admitted to Ottoman 140 courses.