The Turkic languages are a language family of more than 352 documented languages spoken by the of , from and to , , (), and . The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from to , where is thought to have been spoken, and from where they to Central Asia and farther west during the . They are characterized as a .
Turkic languages are spoken by some 200 million people.1 The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish, spoken mainly in Anatolia and the Balkans; its native speakers account for about 38% of all Turkic speakers, followed by Uzbek.4
Turkic languages show many similarities with the Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic languages. These similarities have led some linguists (such as Turkologist Talât Tekin) to propose an Altaic language family, though this proposal is widely rejected by historical linguists.78 Similarities with the Uralic languages even caused these families to be regarded as one for a long time under the Ural-Altaic hypothesis.91011 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 prehistoric language contact.
Where Turkic languages leads. Every connection below has a source: a link in this article, a shared Wikipedia category, or CirrusSearch text similarity. Articles already on your trail are left out.
Taking into account the documented historical-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 confi…
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.
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.
Terms the article defines in bold, quoted in context.
Categories:
Turkic languages
Agglutinative languages
Language families
History of Ural
2,064 words · 127 references · revision 1377797900 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Map showing countries and autonomous subdivisions where a language belonging to the Turkic language family has official status
Turkic languages are null-subject languages, have vowel harmony (with the notable exception of Uzbek due to strong Persian-Tajik influence), converbs, extensive agglutination by means of suffixes and postpositions, and lack of grammatical articles, noun classes, and grammatical gender. Subject–object–verb word order is universal within the family. In terms of the level of vowel harmony in the Turkic language family, Tuvan is characterized as almost fully harmonic whereas Uzbek is the least harmonic or not harmonic at all. Taking into account the documented historical-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 trajectory13 Though vowel harmony is a common characteristic of major language families spoken in Inner Eurasia (Mongolic, Tungusic, Uralic and Turkic), the type of harmony found in them differs from each other; specifically, Uralic and Turkic have a shared type of vowel harmony (called palatal vowel harmony) whereas Mongolic and Tungusic represent a different type.
The homeland of the Turkic peoples and their language is suggested to be somewhere between the Transcaspian steppe and Northeastern Asia (Manchuria),15 with genetic evidence pointing to the region near South Siberia and Mongolia as the "Inner Asian Homeland" of the Turkic ethnicity.15 Similarly several linguists, including Juha Janhunen, Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs, suggest that modern-day Mongolia is the homeland of the . Relying on Proto-Turkic lexical items about the climate, topography, flora, fauna, people's modes of subsistence, Turkologist locates the Proto-Turkic Urheimat either in the southern, taiga-steppe zone of the - region, or from to eastern .
Members
The following table is based mainly upon the classification scheme presented by Lars Johanson.3738
Vocabulary comparison
The following is a brief comparison of cognates among 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 a loanword is 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-derived ateş, whereas the native od is not in use in the standard language anymore). Forms are given in native Latin orthographies unless otherwise noted.
The Turkic language family is currently regarded as one of the world's primary language families.10 Turkic is one of the main members of the controversial Altaic 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 a sprachbund.57
Rejected or controversial theories
Korean
The possibility of a genetic relation between Turkic and Koreanic, independently from Altaic, is suggested by some linguists.585960 Baris Kabak (2006) of the University of Würzburg states that Turkic and Korean share similar phonology as well as morphology.61| Li Yong-Sŏng (2014) suggest that there are several cognates between Turkic and Old Korean. He states that these supposed cognates can be useful to reconstruct the early Turkic language. According to him, words related to nature, earth and ruling but especially to the sky and stars seem to be cognates.
1Nikolai Baskakov and some others believe that the Kyrgyz–Kipchak subgroup originally belonged to the Siberian group, but was significantly influenced by the Kipchak languages and can now be included in the Kipchak group.434445
2Lars Johanson once considered Kyrgyz language to be a member of South Kipchak.(Johanson 1998)
3Nikolai Baskakov and some others considered Southern Altai language to be a member of Kyrgyz-Kipchak subgroup.434445
4Äynu contains a very large Persian vocabulary component, and is spoken exclusively by adult men, almost as a cryptolect.
5Lars Johanson once classified South Siberian group into 4 subgroups (Sayan Turkic, Yenisei Turkic, Chulym Turkic and Altai Turkic). Sayan Turkic consisted of Tuvan (Soyot, Uriankhai) and Tofa (Karagas). Yenisei Turkic consisted of Khakas, Shor and related dialects (Saghay, Qaca, Qizil). Chulym Turkic consisted of dialects such as Küerik. Altai Turkic consisted of Altay (Oirot) and dialects such as Tuba, Qumanda, Qu, Teleut, Telengit. (Johanson 1998)
6According to Lars Johanson, Fuyu Kyrgyz is considered to be closely related to Khakas.
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References
1Rybatzki, Volker (2020). "Altaic Languages: Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic". In Martine Robbeets; Alexander Savelyev (eds.). The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages. Oxford University Press. pp. 22–28. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198804628.003.0003.
3Janhunen, Juha (2013). "Personal pronouns in Core Altaic". In Martine Irma Robbeets; Hubert Cuyckens (eds.). Shared Grammaticalization: With Special Focus on the Transeurasian Languages. John Benjamins. p. 223. ISBN 978-90-272-0599-5. Archived from the original on 15 January 2023. Retrieved 19 April 2017.
4Katzner, Kenneth (March 2002). Languages of the World, Third Edition. . .
Sources
Akhatov G. Kh. 1960. "About the stress in the language of the Siberian Tatars in connection with the stress of modern Tatar literary language" .- Sat *"Problems of Turkic and the history of Russian Oriental Studies." Kazan. (in Russian)
Akhatov G.Kh. 1963. "Dialect West Siberian Tatars" (monograph). Ufa. (in Russian)
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 3-447-05212-0
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.). 2022. The Turkic Languages. Second edition. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-73856-9.
Johanson, Lars. 1998. "Turkic languages." In: Encyclopædia Britannica. CD 98. Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 5 September 2007.[1]Archived 23 June 2008 at the Wayback Machine
Menges, K. H. 1968. The Turkic languages and peoples: An introduction to Turkic studies. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Extensive contact took place between Proto-Turks and Proto-Mongols approximately during the first millennium BC; the shared cultural tradition between the two Eurasian nomadic groups 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 and Mongolic languages. Although the loans were bidirectional, today Turkic loanwords constitute the largest foreign component in Mongolian vocabulary.19
Some lexical and extensive typological similarities between Turkic and the nearby Tungusic and Mongolic families, as well as the Korean and Japonic families has in more recent years been instead attributed to prehistoric contact amongst the group, sometimes referred to as the Northeast 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.
The first established records of the Turkic languages are the Orkhon inscriptions by the Göktürks, recording the Old Turkic language, which were discovered in 1889 in the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia, and are dated to the eighth century AD. The Compendium of the Turkic Dialects (Divânü Lügati't-Türk), written during the 11th century AD 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.21
The Codex Cumanicus (12th–13th centuries AD) concerning the Northwestern branch is another early linguistic manual, between the Kipchak language and Latin, used by the Catholicmissionaries 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, debatably the parent or a distant relative of Chuvash language, are dated to the 13th–14th centuries AD.2223
The geographical distribution of Turkic-speaking peoples across Eurasia since the Ottoman era ranges from the North-East of Siberia to Turkey in the West.2627
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.28
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:2930
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 diverged.31
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.2632
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.
A classification scheme of all the Turkic languages
Schema
The following isoglosses are traditionally used in the classification of the Turkic languages:2934
Rhotacism (or in some views, zetacism), e.g. in the last consonant of the word for "nine" *tokkuz. This separates the Oghur branch, which exhibits /r/, from the rest of Turkic, which exhibits /z/. In this case, rhotacism refers to the development of *-/r/, *-/z/, and *-/d/ to /r/,*-/k/,*-/kh/ in this branch.35 See Antonov and Jacques (2012)36 on the debate concerning rhotacism and lambdacism in Turkic.
Intervocalic *d, e.g. the second consonant in the word for "foot" *hadaq
Suffix-final -G, e.g. in the suffix *lIG, in e.g. *tāglïg
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", *āń
*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.
The linguist Choi suggested already in 1996 a close relationship between Turkic and Korean regardless of any Altaic connections:60
In addition, the fact that the morphological elements are not easily borrowed between languages, added to the fact that the common morphological elements between Korean and Turkic are not less numerous than between Turkic and other Altaic languages, strengthens the possibility that there is a close genetic affinity between Korean and Turkic.
— Choi Han-Woo, A Comparative Study of Korean and Turkic (Hoseo University)
Many historians also point out a close non-linguistic relationship between Turkic peoples and Koreans.62 Especially close were the relations between the Göktürks and Goguryeo.63
Uralic
Some linguists suggested a relation to Uralic languages, especially to the Ugric 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.64
Cyrillic: ата, атай
hCyrillic: ата, атай
iUEY: ئاتا
jCyrillic: аҕа
kCyrillic: атте, аҫу, ашшӗ
lCyrillic: ана, әни
mCyrillic: ана, инә(й)/асай
nCyrillic: эне, ана
oUEY: ئانا
pIPA /ij̃e/. Cyrillic: ийэ. The nasal glide /j̃/ is not distinguished from oral glide /j/ in orthography.
18Golden, Peter B. (27 April 2018), "THE CONSTRUCTION OF ETHNICITY IN MEDIEVAL TURKIC EURASIA", in Schmidtke, Sabine (ed.), Studying the Near and Middle East at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1935–2018, Gorgias Press, pp. 420–428, doi:10.31826/9781463240035-054, ISBN 978-1-4632-4003-5, S2CID198684158, retrieved 28 September 2023The ancient Turkic Urheimat appears to have been located in Southern Siberia from the Lake Baikal region to Eastern Mongolia. The "Proto-Turks" in their Southern Siberian-Mongolian "homeland" were in contact with speakers of Eastern Iranian (Scytho-Sakas, who were also in Mongolia), Uralic and Paleo-Siberian languages.
19Clark, Larry V. (1980). "Turkic Loanwords in Mongol, I: The Treatment of Non-initial S, Z, Š, Č". Central Asiatic Journal. 24 (1/2): 36–59. JSTOR41927278.
20Johanson, Lars; Johanson, Éva Ágnes Csató (29 April 2015). The Turkic Languages. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-136-82527-9. Archived from the original on 15 January 2023. Retrieved 22 November 2020.
22Johanson, Lars; Csató, Éva Á, eds. (2021). The Turkic Languages. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003243809. ISBN 978-1-003-24380-9. “Another Turkic people in the Volga area are the Chuvash, who, like the Tatars, regard themselves as descendants of the Volga Bulghars in the historical and cultural sense. It is clear that Chuvash belongs to the Oghur branch of Turkic, as the language of the Volga Bulghars did, but no direct evidence for diachronic development between the two has been established. As there were several distinct Oghur languages in the Middle Ages, Volga Bulghar could represent one of these and Chuvash another.”
23Agyagási, K. (2020). "A Volga Bulgarian Classifier: A Historical and Areal Linguistic Study". University of Debrecen. 3: 9. “Modern Chuvash is the only descendant language of the Ogur branch. The ancestors of its speakers left the Khazar Empire in the 8th century and migrated to the region at the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers, where they founded the Volga Bulgarian Empire in the 10th century. In the central Volga region three Volga Bulgarian dialects developed, and Chuvash is the descendant of the 3rd dialect of Volga Bulgarian (Agyagási 2019: 160–183). Sources refer to it as a separate language beginning with 1508”
24Poppe, Nicolas J. (1966). "A Survey of Studies of Turkic Loan-Words in the Russian Language". Central Asiatic Journal. 11 (4): 287–310. ISSN0008-9192. JSTOR41926932.
25Findley, Carter V. (October 2004). The Turks in World History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-517726-8.
27Turkic Language tree entries provide the information on the Turkic-speaking regions.
28Johanson, Lars (2001). Discoveries on the Turkic linguistic map. Stockholm: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. ISBN 91-86884-10-7. Retrieved 17 July 2024.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
29Lars Johanson, The History of Turkic. In Lars Johanson & Éva Ágnes Csató (eds), The Turkic Languages, London, New York: Routledge, 81–125, 1998.
32The 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 comparative grounds is to be found in the work of Johanson and his co-workers.
43Baskakov, N. A. (1958). "La Classification des Dialectes de la Langue Turque d'Altaï". Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae (in French). 8: 9–15. ISSN0001-6446.
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59SOME STAR NAMES IN MODERN TURKIC LANGUAGES-I – Yong-Sŏng LI – Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2010-AGC-2101) – Seoul National University 2014
61Kabak, Baris (2006). "Where flexion encroaches on agglutination in Turkish and Korean". In Ko, Yong-Kun (ed.). Whither Morphology in the New Millennium?, Morphology Monograph Series 1.
Öztopçu, Kurtuluş. 1996. Dictionary of the Turkic languages: English, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Uighur, Uzbek. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-14198-2
Samoilovich, A. N. 1922. Some additions to the classification of the Turkish languages. Petrograd.
Savelyev, Alexander and Martine Robbeets. (2019). lexibank/savelyevturkic: Turkic Basic Vocabulary Database (Version v1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3556518
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.
Schönig, Claus. "The Internal Division of Modern Turkic and Its Historical Implications". In: Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, vol. 52, no. 1, 1999, pp. 63–95. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43391369Archived 3 January 2023 at the Wayback Machine. Accessed 3 January 2023.
Starostin, Sergei A., Anna V. Dybo, and Oleg A. Mudrak. 2003. Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 90-04-13153-1
Jeffrey34555mPost-move cleanup, following swap of Cant (language) and Cant: Changed link from Cant (language) to Cant using Move+−11diff
BeshogurUndid revision 1362197908 by Zolgoyo (talk) like Kurbet language these are not separate Turkic languages, they're creoles if they exist of course−879diff
