突厥语族
Kornfilt provides the background of Turkish and Turkic languages. She specifies how Turkic languages share similar features, including vowel harmony, agglutinative morphology, verb-final word order, and nominalised subordinate clauses. She argues that because Turkic languages share these features, it is often difficult to count the total number of completely separate Turkic languages. Additionally, she introduces a controversy about the external genetic relationships of the Turkic family. She describes that while the majority opinion agrees that Turkic languages belong to the overarching Altaic language family, along with Mongolian and Tungusic languages, outlier perspectives claim Korean, Japanese, and even Uralic languages to be Altaic as well.