Turkish is a member of the Oghuz branch of the Turkic language family and has been spoken in Anatolia since the Seljuk migrations of the 11th century. For centuries, the Ottoman state used Ottoman Turkish written in the Arabic script — a tradition maintained through the rise and fall of one of history's largest empires. In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's sweeping modernisation programme, the Arabic script was replaced by a newly designed Latin alphabet tailored to Turkish phonology. Literacy campaigns rapidly spread the new writing system, and within a generation the Ottoman script had passed out of everyday use. Modern Standard Turkish has also been systematically purged of Arabic and Persian loanwords since the 1930s, with the Turkish Language Association coining native replacements drawn from Old Turkic roots.
