The Turkish language is the official language of the Republic of Turkey and one of the most widely spoken languages in south-eastern Europe and western Asia. It belongs to the Oghuz group of Turkic languages, a subgroup of the Altaic language family. Over 80 million people worldwide speak Turkish, including many in Cyprus, Europe and Central Asia. The Turkish language is characterized by its phonetic harmony (vowel harmony), agglutinative structure and a rich vocabulary with influences from Arabic, Persian, French and, increasingly, English. Since the language reform in the 1920s, Turkish has been written using the Latin alphabet.