Turkic languages

Learn more about Turkic languages

The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China. The Turkic languages are traditionally considered to be part of the Altaic language family.

The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Anatolian Turkish, or Turkish proper.

The Turkic language family exhibits vowel harmony, and is typologically characterised by agglutination by means of suffixes, and a Subject Object Verb sentence order.

The first records of Turkic are the 8th century Orkhon inscriptions. With the Early Medieval Turkic expansion, Turkic languages in the course of just a few centuries spread across Central Asia, stretching from Siberia (the Sakha Republic) to the Mediterranean (Seljuk Turks).

For centuries, the Turkic speaking peoples have migrated extensively and intermingled continuously, and their languages have been influenced mutually and through contact with the surrounding languages, especially the Iranian, Slavic, and Mongolic languages. This has obscured the historical developments within each language and/or language group, and as a result, there exist several systems to classify the Turkic languages. The genetic classification of the Turkic languages commonly followed today is the one by Samoilovich (mainly based on the development of *d). However, there are many details for which debate is still ongoing.

[edit] Classification

• West Turkic
  • Bolgar group
    • Chuvash
    • Khazar (extinct)
    • Bolgar (extinct)
    • Hunnic (extinct)
  • Oghuz (Southwestern) group
    • Turkish
    • Afshar
    • Azeri
    • Turkmen
    • Crimean Tatar ¹
    • Urum ¹
    • Qashqai
    • Khorasani Turkish
    • Salar
    • Gagauz
    • Pecheneg (extinct)
    • Ottoman Turkish (extinct)
  • Kypchak (Northwestern) group
    • Kypchak-Bolgar languages
      • Tatar
      • Bashkir
      • Baraba
    • Kypchak-Cuman (Kypchak-Oghuz, Ponto-Caspian) languages
      • Crimean Tatar ¹
      • Urum ¹
      • Karachay-Balkar
      • Kumyk
      • Karaim
      • Krymchak
      • Cuman (extinct)
      • Kipchak (extinct)
    • Kypchak-Nogay languages
      • Kazakh
      • Karakalpak
      • Nogay
  • Chagatay (Southeastern, Karluk) group
    • Uzbek
    • Uyghur
      • Aini ³
    • Lop
    • Ili Turki
    • Chagatay (extinct)
• East Turkic
  • Kyrgyz-Kypchak group
    • Kyrgyz
    • Altay
  • Uyghur (Northeastern) group
    • Yakut
    • Tuvan
    • Khakas
    • Shor
    • Fuyü Gïrgïs
    • Chulym
    • Tofa
    • Dolgan
    • Western Yugur (Yellow Uyghur)
    • Northern Altay
  • Khalaj
    • Khalaj ²

(1) - Crimean Tatar and Urum languages are related to both Kypchak and Oghuz Turkic.

(2) - Khalaj is surrounded by Oghuz languages, but exhibits a number of features that classify it as non-Oghuz.

(3) - Aini is a mixed language with Uyghur grammar and Persian vocabulary, and is spoken exclusively by adult men, almost as a cryptolect.

Geographically and linguistically, the languages of Southwestern, Northwestern, and Southeastern subgroup belong to the central Turkic languages, while the Northeastern, Khalaj language is the so-called peripheral language.

Various elements from the Turkic languages have passed into Hungarian, Persian, Russian, Chinese and to a lesser extent, Arabic.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Sources

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[edit] See also

• Altaic languages
• Orkhon script
• Historical linguistics
• Language families and languages

[edit] External links

• Map of Turkic languages
• Classification of Turkic Languages
• Online Uyghur-English Dictionary
• Turkic languages at the Open Directory Project
• Türk Dili

[edit] Further reading

• Johanson, L. & Csató, E. Á. (eds.) 1998. The Turkic Languages. Routledge: London. ISBN 0-415-08200-5.

• Deny J. et al. 1959. Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta. Wiesbaden.

• Schönig, C. 1997/1998. A new attempt to classify the Turkic languages (1-3). Turkic Languages 1/2.

• Clauson, G. 1972. An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-thirteenth-century Turkish. Oxford.

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