Sunday, February 7, 2016

Post #2: Turkey and their Languages

The indigenous language of Turkey is Turkish with about 77% of the country speaking that as their first language. Other languages include Kurmanji, Arabic, Zazaki and less than 1 percent of other, smaller languages. It does not pose many problems.


As we learned in class, there are many languages that are dying out. There are roughly 7,000 languages in the world and 78% of the world's population speaks the 85 largest languages. Turkish falls to number 22 on the list of 100 most spoken languages in the world, with 63 million people speaking it according to Wikipedia. Turkish is distinct through harsh vowels, a lack of words with gender, and agglutination. (The harsh vowels remind me quite a bit of the German language, in which I am attempting to become fluent in currently). Agglutination means that multiple words are strung together in a language to create a more complex word.

Turkey is a founding member of the UN- United Nations, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. They are also a member of Council of Europe and NATO- National Association for Trade Organization. They are also a member of the WTO- World Trade Organization.



Turkey joined the United Nations on October 24, 1945. They are the 16th biggest contributor to the UN budget which was last recorded in 2013. According to the ministry for foreign affairs, Turkey has become a bigger contributor in recent years. Their website states, "Turkey strives to engage in the work of the General Assembly and its subsidiary bodies to the extent possible. In doing so, Turkey benefits from its membership to different groups as well as regional and international organizations, and makes every effort to play a constructive and reconciliatory role on current issues."

The country itself has been taking interest in affairs other than domestic, in effort to gain closer ties with neighboring countries. They also have been participating in outreach programs with African and Latin American countries.

In my opinion, while Turkey is having trouble with countries in closer prominence to them, such as Syria, they still seem to make it clear that they do not want trouble internationally. While Islamic countries such as Iran and Iraq tend to be more hostile to countries that differ from their own, Turkey makes more of an effort to make allies. Turkey has not betrayed NATO besides their recent interference with Russia invading their borders. Other than that, no threats have been made and they have strayed far away from citizens of the country having partnerships with ISIS. 

Turkey became a member of NATO in 1952. NATO has a big role in the security of Turkey as a country entirely. They work towards making sure they fulfill their efforts of completing missions to keep foreign affairs in line. Turkey encourages a strong, strategic relationship between NATO and the EU. They became an associate member of the European Union on April 14, April 14, 1987. Through both of these programs, the Turkish General Staff created the "Partnership for Peace Training Center," in 1998 to contribute to the training and interoperability efforts of NATO's partner nations. 

The International Monetary Fund is active in Turkey. According to IMF's website, the organization is a group of 189 countries "working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stablity, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world." Turkey has been a member of the IMF since 1947. They currently have no outstanding credit with them.

Turkey is also a member of the WTO - World Trade Organization. Recently (in March), Turkey has signed treaties to extend their trading policies. They accepted the Trade Facilitation Agreement, which entails, according to the WTO website, "provisions for expediting the movement, release and clearance of goods, including goods in transit. It also sets out measures for effective cooperation between customs and other appropriate authorities on trade facilitation and customs compliance issues." Turkey has been a member of WTO since 1995.

Works Cited:
http://www.tr.undp.org/ 
http://www.imf.org/external/about.htm 
https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/countries_e/turkey_e.htm


No comments:

Post a Comment