Turkic languages

TheTurkic languagesare alanguage familyof more than 35documented languages, spoken by theTurkic peoplesofEurasiafromEastern EuropeandSouthern EuropetoCentral Asia,East Asia,North Asia(Siberia), andWest Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning fromMongoliatoNorthwest China, whereProto-Turkicis thought to have been spoken,from where theyexpandedto Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium.They are characterized as adialect continuum.
Turkic languages are spoken by some 200 million people.The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers isTurkish, spoken mainly inAnatoliaand theBalkans; its native speakers account for about 38% of all Turkic speakers, followed byUzbek.
Characteristic features such asvowel harmony,agglutination,subject-object-verborder, and lack ofgrammatical gender, are almost universal within the Turkic family.There is a high degree ofmutual intelligibility, upon moderate exposure, among the variousOghuz languages, which includeTurkish,Azerbaijani,Turkmen,Qashqai,Chaharmahali Turkic,Gagauz, andBalkan Gagauz Turkish, as well as Oghuz-influencedCrimean Tatar.Other Turkic languages demonstrate varying amounts of mutual intelligibility within their subgroups as well. Although methods of classification vary, the Turkic languages are usually considered to be divided into two branches:Oghur, of which the  only surviving member isChuvash, andCommon Turkic, which includes all other Turkic languages.
Turkic languages show many similarities with theMongolic,Tungusic,Koreanic, andJaponiclanguages. These similarities have led some linguists (includingTalât Tekin) to propose anAltaic language family, though this proposal is widely rejected by historical linguists.Similarities with theUralic languageseven caused these families to be regarded as one for a long time under theUral-Altaichypothesis.However, there has not been sufficient evidence to conclude the existence of either of these macrofamilies. The shared characteristics between the languages are attributed presently to extensive prehistoriclanguage contact.
Turkic languages arenull-subject languages, havevowel harmony(with the notable exception ofUzbekdue to strong Persian-Tajik influence),converbs, extensiveagglutinationby means ofsuffixesandpostpositions, and lack ofgrammatical articles,noun classes, andgrammatical gender.Subject–object–verbword order is universal within the family. In terms of the level ofvowel harmonyin the Turkic language family,Tuvanis characterized as almost fully harmonic whereasUzbekis the least harmonic or not harmonic at all. Taking into account the documented historico-linguistic development of Turkic languages overall, both inscriptional and textual, the family provides over one millennium of documented stages as well as scenarios in the linguistic evolution of vowel harmony which, in turn, demonstrates harmony evolution along a confidently definable trajectoryThough vowel harmony is a common characteristic of major language families spoken in Inner Eurasia (Mongolic,Tungusic,Uralicand Turkic), the type of harmony found in them differs from each other, specifically, Uralic and Turkic have a shared type of vowel harmony (calledpalatal vowel harmony) whereas Mongolic and Tungusic represent a different type.
The homeland of theTurkic peoplesand their language is suggested to be somewhere between theTranscaspian steppeandNortheastern Asia(Manchuria),with genetic evidence pointing to the region nearSouth SiberiaandMongoliaas the "Inner Asian Homeland" of the Turkic ethnicity.Similarly several linguists, includingJuha Janhunen,Roger Blenchand Matthew Spriggs, suggest that modern-dayMongoliais the homeland of the early Turkic language.Relying on Proto-Turkic lexical items about the climate, topography, flora, fauna, people's modes of subsistence, TurkologistPeter Benjamin Goldenlocates the Proto-Turkic Urheimat in the southern, taiga-steppe zone of theSayan-Altayregion.
Extensive contact took place betweenProto-TurksandProto-Mongolsapproximately during the first millennium BC; the shared cultural tradition between the twoEurasian nomadicgroups is called the "Turco-Mongol" tradition. The two groups shared a similar religion system,Tengrism, and there exists a multitude of evident loanwords between Turkic languages andMongolic languages. Although the loans were bidirectional, today Turkic loanwords constitute the largest foreign component in Mongolian vocabulary.
Italian historian and philologistIgor de Rachewiltznoted a significant distinction of theChuvash languagefrom other Turkic languages. According to him, the Chuvash language does not share certain common characteristics with Turkic languages to such a degree that some scholars consider it an independent Chuvash family similar to Uralic and Turkic languages. Turkic classification of Chuvash was seen as a compromise solution for the classification purposes.
Some lexical and extensive typological similarities between Turkic and the nearbyTungusicandMongolicfamilies, as well as theKoreanandJaponicfamilies has in more recent years been instead attributed to prehistoric contact amongst the group, sometimes referred to as theNortheast Asian sprachbund. A more recent (circa first millennium BC) contact between "core Altaic" (Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic) is distinguished from this, due to the existence of definitive common words that appear to have been mostly borrowed from Turkic into Mongolic, and later from Mongolic into Tungusic, as Turkic borrowings into Mongolic significantly outnumber Mongolic borrowings into Turkic, and Turkic and Tungusic do not share any words that do not also exist in Mongolic.
Turkic languages also show some Chineseloanwordsthat point to early contact during the time ofProto-Turkic.
The first established records of the Turkic languages are the eighth century ADOrkhon inscriptionsby theGöktürks, recording theOld Turkiclanguage, which were discovered in 1889 in theOrkhon Valleyin Mongolia. TheCompendium of the Turkic Dialects(Divânü Lügati't-Türk), written during the 11th century AD byKaşgarlı Mahmudof theKara-Khanid Khanate, constitutes an early linguistic treatment of the family. TheCompendiumis 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 theSouthwestern branchof the family.
TheCodex Cumanicus(12th–13th centuries AD) concerning theNorthwestern branchis another early linguistic manual, between theKipchak languageandLatin, used by theCatholicmissionariessent to the WesternCumansinhabiting a region corresponding to present-dayHungaryandRomania. The earliest records of the language spoken byVolga Bulgars, debatably the parent or a distant relative ofChuvash language, are dated to the 13th–14th centuries AD.
With theTurkic expansionduring theEarly Middle Ages(c. 6th–11th centuries AD), Turkic languages, in the course of just a few centuries, spread acrossCentral Asia, fromSiberiato theMediterranean. Various terminologies from the Turkic languages have passed intoPersian,Urdu,Ukrainian,Russian,Chinese,Mongolian,Hungarianand to a lesser extent,Arabic.
The geographical distribution of Turkic-speaking peoples acrossEurasiasince the Ottoman era ranges from the North-East ofSiberiato Turkey in the West.(See picture in the box on the right above.)
For centuries, the Turkic-speaking peoples have migrated extensively and intermingled continuously, and their languages have been influenced mutually and throughcontactwith the surrounding languages, especially theIranian,Slavic, andMongolic 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).
The Turkic languages may be divided into six branches:
In this classification,Oghur Turkicis also referred to as Lir-Turkic, and the other branches are subsumed under the title of Shaz-Turkic orCommon Turkic. It is not clear when these two major types of Turkic can be assumed to have diverged.
With less certainty, the Southwestern, Northwestern, Southeastern and Oghur groups may further be summarized asWest Turkic, the Northeastern, Kyrgyz-Kipchak, and Arghu (Khalaj) groups asEast Turkic.
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.
Hruschka, et al. (2014)usecomputational phylogeneticmethods to calculate a tree of Turkic based on phonologicalsound changes.
The followingisoglossesare traditionally used in the classification of the Turkic languages:
Additional isoglosses include:
*In the standard Istanbul dialect of Turkish, theğindağanddağlıis not realized as a consonant, but as a slight lengthening of the preceding vowel.
The following table is based mainly upon the classification scheme presented byLars Johanson.
The following is a brief comparison ofcognatesamong the basic vocabulary across the Turkic language family (about 60 words). Despite being cognates, some of the words may denote a different meaning.
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 cognate with the other words in the row or that aloanwordis used in its place.
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, or a loanword is much more common (e.g. in Turkish, the preferred word for "fire" is the Persian-derivedateş, whereas the nativeodis dead). Forms are given in native Latin orthographies unless otherwise noted.
Azerbaijani "ǝ" and "ä": IPA /æ/
Azerbaijani "q": IPA /g/, word-final "q": IPA /x/
Turkish and Azerbaijani "ı", Karakhanid "ɨ", Turkmen "y", and Sakha "ï": IPA /ɯ/
Turkmen "ň", Karakhanid "ŋ": IPA /ŋ/
Turkish and Azerbaijani "y",Turkmen "ý" and "j" in other languages: IPA /j/
All "ş" and "š" letters: IPA /ʃ/
All "ç" and "č" letters: IPA /t͡ʃ/
Kyrgyz "c": IPA /d͡ʒ/
Kazakh "j": IPA /ʒ/
The Turkic language family is currently regarded as one of the world's primarylanguage families.Turkic is one of the main members of the controversialAltaic language family, but Altaic currently lacks support from a majority of linguists. None of the theories linking Turkic languages to other families have a wide degree of acceptance at present. Shared features with languages grouped together as Altaic have been interpreted by most mainstream linguists to be the result of asprachbund.
The possibility of a genetic relation between Turkic andKorean, independently from Altaic, is suggested by some linguists.The linguist Kabak (2004) of theUniversity of Würzburgstates that Turkic and Korean share similarphonologyas well asmorphology. Li Yong-Sŏng (2014)suggest that there are severalcognatesbetween Turkic andOld Korean. He states that these supposed cognates can be useful to reconstruct the early Turkic language. According to him, words related to nature, earth andrulingbut especially to theskyandstarsseem to be cognates.
The linguist Choisuggested already in 1996 a close relationship between Turkic and Korean regardless of any Altaic connections:
Many historians also point out a close non-linguistic relationship betweenTurkic peoplesandKoreans.Especially close were the relations between theGöktürksandGoguryeo.
Some linguists suggested a relation toUralic languages, especially to theUgric languages. This view is rejected and seen as obsolete by mainstream linguists. Similarities are because of language contact and borrowings mostly from Turkic into Ugric languages. Stachowski (2015) states that any relation between Turkic and Uralic must be a contact one.