Why Don't Turks Speak Arabic Either? 🇹🇷 #shorts

Iranians don't speak Arabic, and neither do Turks, but their story is even stranger. Turkic peoples came from Central Asia, thousands of miles from Arabia. They became Muslim but kept their own language. Then they flipped it: in 1517 the Ottoman Turks under Selim I conquered the Arab world, and ruled much of it for about 400 years. Turkish was still written in Arabic letters until 1928, when Atatürk switched it to the Latin alphabet in a matter of months.

So is Turkey Middle East, or Europe? 👇

Sources: Wikipedia – Ottoman–Mamluk War (1516–1517); Wikipedia – Turkish alphabet reform (1928); Wikipedia – Orkhon inscriptions.

Historical borders: historical-basemaps by aourednik (GPL-3.0).
Satellite imagery: Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX (s2maps.eu), contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016.
Photos (Atatürk, 1928 alphabet, Selim I, Göktürk stone): public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Music: ElevenLabs.