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Turkic languages
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 traditionally considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.[1][2] Turkic languages are spoken by some 180 million people as a native language;[3] and the total number of Turkic speakers is about 200 million, including speakers as a second language. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish proper, or Anatolian Turkish, the speakers of which account for about 40% of all Turkic speakers.[2]
CharacteristicsThe 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, 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 some linguists though plainly accepted in the Voegelin & Voegelin classification (1977:18-19).[4] HistoryThe 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).[5] 
Distribution of the Altaic languages across Eurasia. The inclusion of Japanese and Korean, and to a lesser degree the existence of a single Altaic language family, is controversial. Early written recordsThe 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 Ka?garl? 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.[6] 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 developmentWith 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.[7] ClassificationFor 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.[8] 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)[9] 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):[10]
In this classification, Oghur Turkic is also referred to as Lir-Turkic and the other branches ar 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.[12] 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.[13] Geographically and linguistically, the languages of Northwestern, and Southeastern subgroup belong to the central Turkic languages, while the Northeastern and Khalaj languages are the so-called peripheral languages. Classification SchemaThe following isoglosses are traditionally used in the classification of the Turkic languages:[10]
Additional isoglosses include:
*In the standard Istanbul dialect of Turkish, the ? in da? and da?l? is not realized as a consonant, but as a slight lengthening of the preceding vowel. MembersThe following table is based upon the classification scheme presented by Lars Johanson (1998)[15]
Vocabulary comparisonThe 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.
ReferencesFurther reading
See alsoExternal links
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