Turkish is a very ancient language and belongs to the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic family of languages. As one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, it is spoken by almost 65 million people in Turkey and over a large geographical area in Europe and Asia.
It is spoken in Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uigur and some population in Cyprus (11.6%) Mongolia (1%), Iran (Turkic and Turkic dialects 26%, Turkish 1%) Iraq (10%). Furthermore, over a million speakers are found in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece, more than 1.5 million speakers live in Germany and nearly half a million live in other European countries.
With a few exceptions, the main features which distinguish the Altaic languages from Indo-European are as follows:
- Vowel harmony is a feature of all Ural-Altaic tongues.
- No gender.
- Agglutination.
- Adjectives precede nouns.
- Verbs come at the end of the sentence.
Quoted from
http://www.onlineturkish.com/history.asp