Turkic languages

Turkic
Geographic distribution:	Originally from Western China to Siberia and Eastern Europe
Linguistic Classification:	Altaic[1] (controversial)  Turkic
Subdivisions:	Southwestern (Oghuz Turkic) Northwestern (Kipchak Turkic) Southeastern (Uyghur Turkic) Northeastern (Siberian Turkic) Oghur Turkic Khalaj (the "Arghu" branch)
ISO 639-5:	trk
Countries and autonomous subdivisions where a Turkic language has official status

The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five^[2] languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.^[1][3]

Turkic languages are spoken as a native language by some 165^[4] to 180 million people;^[5] and the total number of Turkic speakers is over 200 million, including speakers of a second language. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish proper, or Anatolian [and Balkan] Turkish, the speakers of which account for about 40% of all Turkic speakers.^[3] Characteristic features of Turkish, such as vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family.^[3] There is also a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the various Oghuz languages, which include Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz, and Balkan Gagauz Turkish.^[6]

Characteristics

The characteristic features of the Turkic languages are vowel harmony, extensive agglutination by means of suffixes, and lack of noun classes or grammatical gender. Subject Object Verb word order is universal within the family. All of these distinguishing characteristics are shared with the Mongolic and Tungusic language families, as well as with the Korean language (with the exception of vowel harmony), which are by some linguists considered to be genetically linked with the Turkic languages in the proposed Altaic language family, a language family rejected by most linguists^[7] though accepted in the Voegelin & Voegelin classification (1977:18-19).^[8]

History

The geographical distribution of Turkic-speaking peoples across Eurasia ranges from the North-East of Siberia to Turkey in the West (see picture in the box on the right above).^[9]

Distribution of the Turkic languages across Eurasia.

Early written records

The first established records of the Turkic languages are the 8th century Orkhon inscriptions by the Göktürks, recording the Old Turkic language, which were discovered in 1889 in the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia. The Compendium of the Turkic Dialects (Divânü Lügati't-Türk), written during the 11th century by Kaşgarlı Mahmud of the Kara-Khanid Khanate, constitutes an early linguistic treatment of the family. The Compendium is the first comprehensive dictionary of the Turkic languages and also includes the first known map of the Turkic speakers' geographical distribution. It mainly pertains to the Southwestern branch of the family.^[10]

The Codex Cumanicus (12th - 13th centuries) concerning the Northwestern branch is another early linguistic manual, between the Kipchak language and Latin, used by the Catholic missionaries sent to the Western Cumans inhabiting a region corresponding to present-day Hungary and Romania. The earliest records of the language spoken by Volga Bulgars, the parent to today's Chuvash language, are dated to the 13th - 14th centuries.

Geographical expansion and development

With the Turkic expansion during Early Middle Ages (c. 6th - 11th centuries), 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). Various elements from the Turkic languages have passed into Hungarian, Persian, Urdu, Russian, Chinese and to a lesser extent, Arabic.^[11]

Classification

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.^[12] 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 modern genetic classification schemes for Turkic are still largely indebted to Samoilovich (1922)^[13] and are mainly based on the development of *d. However, there are still many elements of questioning for which ongoing research has not yet found an adequate solution.

The Turkic languages may be divided into six branches (Johanson 1998):^[14]

1. Southwestern (Oghuz Turkic)
2. Northwestern (Kipchak Turkic)
3. Southeastern (Uyghur Turkic)^[15]
4. Northeastern (Siberian Turkic)
5. Oghur Turkic
6. Arghu Turkic

In this classification, Oghur Turkic is also referred to as Lir-Turkic and the other branches are subsumed under the title of Shaz-Turkic or Common Turkic. It is not clear when these two major types of Turkic can be assumed to have actually diverged.^[16]

With less certainty, the Southwestern, Northwestern, Southeastern and Oghur groups may further be summarized as West Turkic, the Northeastern, Kyrgyz-Kipchak and Arghu (Khalaj) groups as East Turkic.^[17]

Geographically and linguistically, the languages of the Northwestern and Southeastern subgroups belong to the central Turkic languages, while the Northeastern and Khalaj languages are the so-called peripheral languages.

Classification Schema

The following isoglosses are traditionally used in the classification of the Turkic languages:^[14]

• Rhoticisation, e.g. in the last consonant of the word for "nine" *toqqız. This separates the Oghur branch, which exhibits /r/, from the rest of Turkic, which exhibits /z/. In this case, rhoticisation refers to the development of *-/r/, *-/z/, and *-/d/ to /r/ in this branch.^[18]
• Intervocalic *d, e.g. the second consonant in the word for "foot" *hadaq
• Word-final -G, e.g. in the word for "mountain" *tāğ
• Suffix-final -G, e.g. in the suffix *lIG, in e.g. *tāğlığ

Additional isoglosses include:

• Preservation of word initial *h, e.g. in the word for "foot" *hadaq
  • This separates Khalaj as a peripheral language
• Denasalisation of palatal *ń, e.g. in the word for "moon", *ań

*In the standard Istanbul dialect of Turkish, the ğ in dağ and dağlık is not realized as a consonant, but as a slight lengthening of the preceding vowel.

Members

The following table is based upon the classification scheme presented by Lars Johanson (1998)^[19]

Vocabulary comparison

The following is a brief comparison of cognates among the basic vocabulary across the Turkic language family (about 60 words). Note that empty cells do not necessarily imply that a particular language is lacking a word to describe the concept, but rather that the word for the concept in that language may be formed from another stem and is not a cognate with the other words in the row or that the equivalent was unknown to contributors to this article. Also, there may be shifts in the meaning from one language to another, and so the "common meaning" given is only approximate. In some cases the form given is found only in some dialects of the language. Forms are given in native Latin orthographies unless otherwise noted.

See also

• Altaic languages
• Ural-Altaic languages
• Proto-Turkic language
• Old Turkic
• Middle Turkic
• Orkhon script

References

Further reading

• Baskakov, N.A. 1962, 1969. Introduction to the study of the Turkic languages. Moscow. (In Russian)
• Boeschoten, Hendrik & Lars Johanson. 2006. Turkic languages in contact. Turcologica, Bd. 61. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ISBN 3447052120
• Clausen, Gerard. 1972. An etymological dictionary of pre-thirteenth-century Turkish. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Deny, Jean et al. 1959-1964. Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
• Johanson, Lars & Éva Agnes Csató (ed.). 1998. The Turkic languages. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-08200-5.
• Johanson, Lars. 1998. "The history of Turkic." In: Johanson & Csató, pp. 81–125.[5]
• Johanson, Lars. 1998. "Turkic languages." In: Encyclopædia Britannica. CD 98. Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 5 sept. 2007.[6]
• Menges, K. H. 1968. The Turkic languages and peoples: An introduction to Turkic studies. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
• Öztopçu, Kurtuluş. 1996. Dictionary of the Turkic languages: English, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Uighur, Uzbek. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415141982
• Samoilovich, A. N. 1922. Some additions to the classification of the Turkish languages. Petrograd.[7]
• Schönig, Claus. 1997-1998. "A new attempt to classify the Turkic languages I-III." Turkic Languages 1:1.117–133, 1:2.262–277, 2:1.130–151.
• Starostin, Sergei A., Anna V. Dybo, and Oleg A. Mudrak. 2003. Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 9004131531
• Voegelin, C.F. & F.M. Voegelin. 1977. Classification and index of the World's languages. New York: Elsevier.

External links

• The LINGUIST List MultiTree Project: Turkic Family Tree
• Turkic Languages: Resources - University of Michigan
• Map of Turkic languages
• Classification of Turkic Languages
• Online Uyghur-English Dictionary
• Turkic languages at the Open Directory Project
• Turkic language vocabulary comparison tool / dictionary
• The Turkic Languages in a Nutshell with illustrations.

Turkic-speaking regions Federal subjects of Russia shown in italics.     Western Turkic  Azerbaijan1  Bashkortostan  Chuvashia  Northern Cyprus Eastern Turkic  Altai Republic  Khakassia  Kyrgyzstan  Gagauzia (Moldova)  Kabardino-Balkaria  Karachay-Cherkessia  Karakalpakstan (Uzbekistan)  Sakha Republic  Tuva  Kazakhstan  Tatarstan  Turkey  Turkmenistan  Uzbekistan  Xinjiang (China)  Bayan Olgiy (Mongolia) 1 Includes the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic.