The
Turkic languages constitute a
language family of some thirty 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.
Turkic languages are spoken by some 180 million people as a native language; and the total number of Turkic speakers is over 200 million, including speakers as 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.
Characteristic features of Turkish, such as
vowel harmony,
agglutination, and lack of
grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family and the Altaic languages.
There is also a high degree of
mutual intelligibility between the various Oghuz languages, which include
Turkish,
Azeri,
Turkmen,
Qashqai,
Gagauz, and
Balkan Gagauz Turkish.
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 though accepted in the Voegelin & Voegelin classification (1977:18-19).
History
The geographical distribution of Turkic-speaking peoples across
Eurasia spreads from Turkey in the West to the North-East of
Siberia (see picture in the box on the right above).
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.
The
Codex Cumanicus (12th - 13th centuries) concerning the
Northwestern branch is another early linguistic manual, between
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 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.
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.
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) 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):
[Lars Johanson, The History of Turkic. In Lars Johanson & Éva Ágnes Csató (eds), The Turkic Languages, London, New York: Routledge, 81-125, 1998.]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.
With less certainty, the Southwestern, Northwestern, Southeastern and Oghur groups may further be summarized as
West Turkic, the Northeastern, Kyrgyz-Kypchak and Arghu (Khalaj) groups as
East Turkic.
[ The reliability of Ethnologue lies mainly in its statistics whereas its framework for the internal classification of Turkic is still based largely on Baskakov (1962) and the collective work in Deny et al. (1959-1964). A more up to date alternative to classifying these languages on internal camparative grounds is to be found in the work of Johanson and his co-workers.]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:
- 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.
- Intervocalic *d, e.g. in 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
- #df58248c414f342c81e056b40bee12d17a08bf61##In the standard Istanbul dialect of Turkish, the ğ in dağ and dağlı 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)
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 imply that a particular language is lacking a word to describe the concept, but rather that the word for the concept in that language is formed from another stem and is not a cognate with the other words in the row. 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
