Turkey officially adopted the Latin alphabet to replace the Ottoman Turkish script in 1928.
The change was made during the reforms associated with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. The Turkish parliament approved the alphabet law on 1 November 1928, and the new alphabet was introduced rapidly through schools, government offices, and public campaigns.
Ottoman Turkish had been written in a version of the Arabic script. That script was poorly suited to representing the vowel system of Turkish, while the new Latin-based alphabet was designed specifically for Turkish sounds. The modern Turkish alphabet contains 29 letters and includes characters such as ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, and ü.
The reform changed written Turkish, not the language’s basic identity. Turkish still belongs to the Turkic language family, and it remains closely related to languages such as Azerbaijani and Turkmen. The date is sometimes confused with the foundation of the republic, which occurred in 1923.