The Turkic languages are a

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in h ...

of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the

Turkic peoples The Turkic peoples are a collection of diverse ethnic groups of West, Central, East, and North Asia as well as parts of Europe, who speak Turkic languages.. "Turkic peoples, any of various peoples whose members speak languages belonging t ...

of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to

Central Asia Central Asia, also known as Middle Asia, is a subregion, region of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to western China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north. It includes t ...

East Asia East Asia is the eastern region of Asia, which is defined in both Geography, geographical and culture, ethno-cultural terms. The modern State (polity), states of East Asia include China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. ...

, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from Mongolia to

Northwest China Northwest China () is a statistical region of China which includes the autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Ningxia and the provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu and Qinghai. It has an area of 3,107,900 km2. The region is characterized by a (semi-)arid con ...

, where

Proto-Turkic Proto-Turkic is the linguistic reconstruction of the common ancestor of the Turkic languages that was spoken by the Proto-Turks before their divergence into the various Turkic peoples. Proto-Turkic separated into Oghur (western) and Common Turk ...

is thought to have been spoken, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium. They are characterized as a

dialect continuum A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varie ...

. Turkic languages are spoken by some 200 million people. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish, spoken mainly in

Anatolia Anatolia, tr, Anadolu Yarımadası), and the Anatolian plateau, also known as Asia Minor, is a large peninsula in Western Asia and the westernmost protrusion of the Asian continent. It constitutes the major part of modern-day Turkey. The ...

and the Balkans; its native speakers account for about 38% of all Turkic speakers. Characteristic features such as vowel harmony, agglutination, subject-object-verb order, and lack of

grammatical gender In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...

, are almost universal within the Turkic family. There is a high degree of

mutual intelligibility In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...

, upon moderate exposure, among the various Oghuz languages, which include Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai,

Chaharmahali Turkic Chaharmahali Turkic (Chaharmahali: ترکچیسی چهار مهالی) is a proposed Oghuz Turkic variety spoken in Iran's Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province, and western Isfahan Province where it is described as "Esfahan Province Turkic" by li ...

, Gagauz, and

Balkan Gagauz Turkish Balkan Gagauz Turkish, or Rumelian Turkish ( tr, Rumeli Türkçesi), is a Turkic language spoken in European Turkey, in Dulovo and the Deliorman area in Bulgaria, the Prizren area in Kosovo and the Kumanovo and Bitola areas of North Macedonia. ...

, as well as Oghuz-influenced Crimean Tatar. Although methods of classification vary, the Turkic languages are usually considered to be divided into two branches: Oghur, the only surviving member of which is Chuvash, and Common Turkic, which includes all other Turkic languages including the Oghuz sub-branch. Turkic languages show many similarities with the Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic languages. These similarities have led some linguists to propose an Altaic language family, though this proposal is widely rejected by Western historical linguists. Similarities with the Uralic languages even caused these families to be regarded as one for a long time under the

Ural-Altaic Ural-Altaic, Uralo-Altaic or Uraltaic is a linguistic convergence zone and former language-family proposal uniting the Uralic and the Altaic (in the narrow sense) languages. It is generally now agreed that even the Altaic languages do not share ...

hypothesis.George van DRIEM: Handbuch der Orientalistik. Volume 1 Part 10. BRILL 2001. Page 336 However, there has not been sufficient evidence to conclude the existence of either of these macrofamilies, the shared characteristics between the languages being attributed presently to extensive prehistoric language contact.

Characteristics

Turkic languages are null-subject languages, have vowel harmony (with the notable exception of Uzbek), extensive agglutination by means of suffixes and

postpositions Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

, and lack of grammatical articles, noun classes, and

. Subject–object–verb word order is universal within the family.

History

Pre-history

The homeland of the

and their language is suggested to be somewhere between the Transcaspian steppe and Northeastern Asia ( Manchuria), with genetic evidence pointing to the region near

South Siberia South Central Siberia is a geographical region north of the point where Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia come together. Regions of Asia North Asia The Four Corners At approximately , the borders of Russia, China, Mongolia and Kaz ...

and Mongolia as the "Inner Asian Homeland" of the Turkic ethnicity. Similarly several linguists, including

Juha Janhunen Juha Janhunen (born 12 February 1952 in Pori, Finland) is a Finnish linguist whose wide interests include Uralic and Mongolic languages. Since 1994 he has been Professor in East Asian studies at the University of Helsinki. He has done fieldwork on ...

, Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs, suggest that modern-day Mongolia is the homeland of the early Turkic language. Relying on Proto-Turkic lexical items about the climate, topography, flora, fauna, people's modes of subsistence, Turkologist Peter Benjamin Golden locates the Proto-Turkic Urheimat in the southern, taiga-steppe zone of the Sayan- Altay region. Extensive contact took place between Proto-Turks and

Proto-Mongols The proto-Mongols emerged from an area that had been inhabited by humans and predecessor hominin species as far back as 45,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic. The people there went through the Bronze and Iron Ages, forming tribal allianc ...

approximately during the first millennium BC; the shared cultural tradition between the two Eurasian nomadic groups is called the "

Turco-Mongol The Turco-Mongol or Turko-Mongol tradition was an ethnocultural synthesis that arose in Asia during the 14th century, among the ruling elites of the Golden Horde and the Chagatai Khanate. The ruling Mongol elites of these Khanates eventuall ...

" 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. Some lexical and extensive typological similarities between Turkic and the nearby Tungusic and Mongolic families, as well as the

Korean Korean may refer to: People and culture * Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula * Korean cuisine * Korean culture * Korean language **Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl **Korean dialects and the Jeju language ** ...

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. Kuli Chur inscription

Turkic languages also show some Chinese

loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...

s that point to early contact during the time of

. Robbeets (et al. 2015 and et al. 2017) suggest that the homeland of the Turkic languages was somewhere in Manchuria, close to the Mongolic, Tungusic and Koreanic homeland (including the ancestor of Japonic), and that these languages share a common " Transeurasian" origin. More evidence for the proposed ancestral "Transeurasian" origin was presented by Nelson et al. 2020 and Li et al. 2020.

Early written records

The first established records of the Turkic languages are the eighth century AD Orkhon inscriptions by the Göktürks, recording the

Old Turkic Old Turkic (also East Old Turkic, Orkhon Turkic language, Old Uyghur) is the earliest attested form of the Turkic languages, found in Göktürk and Uyghur Khaganate inscriptions dating from about the eighth to the 13th century. It is the old ...

language, which were discovered in 1889 in the

Orkhon Valley Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape (; mn, Орхоны хөндийн соёлын дурсгал, Orkhony xöndiiyn soyoliyn dursgal, Mongolian Script: ) sprawls along the banks of the Orkhon River in Central Mongolia, some 320 km west fro ...

in Mongolia. The ''Compendium of the Turkic Dialects'' ('' Divânü Lügati't-Türk''), written during the 11th century AD by Kaşgarlı Mahmud of the

Kara-Khanid Khanate The Kara-Khanid Khanate (; ), also known as the Karakhanids, Qarakhanids, Ilek Khanids or the Afrasiabids (), was a Turkic khanate that ruled Central Asia in the 9th through the early 13th century. The dynastic names of Karakhanids and Ilek K ...

, 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 The Codex Cumanicus is a linguistic manual of the Middle Ages, designed to help Catholic missionaries communicate with the Cumans, a nomadic Turkic people. It is currently housed in the Library of St. Mark, in Venice (BNM ms Lat. Z. 549 (=1597 ...

(12th–13th centuries AD) concerning the Northwestern branch is another early linguistic manual, between the

Kipchak language Cuman or Kuman (also called Kipchak, Qypchaq or Polovtsian) was a Kipchak Turkic language spoken by the Cumans (Polovtsy, Folban, Vallany, Kun) and Kipchaks; the language was similar to today's various languages of the Kipchak-Cuman branch. Cu ...

and

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

, used by the

Catholic The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

missionaries sent to the Western Cumans inhabiting a region corresponding to present-day

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the ...

and

Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, and ...

. The earliest records of the language spoken by Volga Bulgars, the parent to today's Chuvash language, are dated to the 13th–14th centuries AD.

Geographical expansion and development

With the

Turkic expansion The Turkic peoples are a collection of diverse ethnic groups of West Asia, West, Central Asia, Central, East Asia, East, and North Asia as well as parts of Europe, who speak Turkic languages.. "Turkic peoples, any of various peoples whose memb ...

during the Early Middle Ages (c. 6th–11th centuries AD), Turkic languages, in the course of just a few centuries, spread across

, from Siberia to the

Mediterranean The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western Europe, Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa ...

. Various terminologies from the Turkic languages have passed into

Persian Persian may refer to: * People and things from Iran, historically called ''Persia'' in the English language ** Persians, the majority ethnic group in Iran, not to be conflated with the Iranic peoples ** Persian language, an Iranian language of the ...

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' Ukrainian,

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

, Chinese, Mongolian, Hungarian and to a lesser extent, Arabic. 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. (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 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). The Turkic languages may be divided into six branches:Lars Johanson, The History of Turkic. In Lars Johanson & Éva Ágnes Csató (eds), The Turkic Languages, London, New York: Routledge, 81–125, 199
Classification of Turkic languages
/ref> * Common Turkic ** Southwestern ( Oghuz Turkic) ** Southeastern ( Karluk Turkic) ** Northwestern ( Kipchak Turkic) ** Northeastern ( Siberian Turkic) ** Arghu Turkic * Oghur 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 diverged. 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. 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 comparative 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. Hruschka, et al. (2014) use computational phylogenetic methods to calculate a tree of Turkic based on phonological sound changes. LinguisticDiagramTurkic

Schema

The following isoglosses are traditionally used in the classification of the Turkic languages: * 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. See Antonov and Jacques (2012) 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.

Members

The following table is based mainly upon the classification scheme presented by Lars Johanson

Vocabulary comparison

The following is a brief comparison of cognates among the basic vocabulary across the Turkic language family (about 60 words). 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

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 dead). Forms are given in native Latin orthographies unless otherwise noted. Azerbaijani "ǝ" and "ä": IPA /æ/ 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 and Kazakh "j": IPA /d͡ʒ/

Other possible relations

The Turkic language family is currently regarded as one of the world's primary

language families A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hi ...

. Turkic is one of the main members of the controversial Altaic language family. There are some other theories about an external relationship but none of them are generally accepted.

Korean

The possibility of a genetic relation between Turkic and

, independently from Altaic, is suggested by some linguists.SOME 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 The linguist Kabak (2004) of the University of Würzburg states that Turkic and Korean share similar

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

as well as

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...

. 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. The linguist Choi suggested 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 between

and Koreans. Especially close were the relations between the Göktürks and Goguryeo.

Rejected or controversial theories

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.

Notes

References

Zenodo Zenodo is a general-purpose open repository developed under the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN. It allows researchers to deposit research papers, data sets, research software, reports, and any other research related digital artef ...

Monumenta Altaica
(Grammar and other sources by

Russian Academy of Sciences The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS; russian: Росси́йская акаде́мия нау́к (РАН) ''Rossíyskaya akadémiya naúk'') consists of the national academy of Russia; a network of scientific research institutes from across ...

)
Turkic Interlingua
( NLP project for Turkic languages)
Turkic Database
at Elegant Lexicon (Comprehensive lexical database for Turkic languages)
TurkLang ConferenceAstana, Kazakhstan, 2013Istanbul, Turkey, 2014

Kazan, Tatarstan, 2015
{{DEFAULTSORT:Turkic Languages Agglutinative languages Language families History of Ural