Turkish

Turkish is the largest of the Turkic languages — 85 million speakers in Turkey, plus the language's near-cousins (Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kazakh, Uyghur) reaching all the way to western China. It's the language of Pamuk and Yaşar Kemal, of Istanbul (the only city on two continents), and of a music, food and TV-drama culture whose influence is increasingly felt across the Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans and southeast Europe.

For English speakers, Turkish is unusual: it looks intimidating on paper but is one of the most logically structured languages on earth. The alphabet is Latin (since Atatürk's 1928 reforms) and strictly phonetic; the grammar is famously regular — almost no irregular verbs — and is built on agglutination, where suffixes stack up to make whole sentences out of one word. Once your ear adjusts to the vowel harmony, Turkish unlocks a culture that's genuinely warm to learners and a country that sits at the hinge of three continents.