The Turkic languages are a language family consisting of more than 35 documented languages spoken by the Turkic peoples from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and West Asia. The Turkic languages arose in a region in East Asia stretching from Mongolia to northwestern China, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, and spread over the first millennium into Central Asia and farther west. These languages are described as a dialect continuum.
The Turkic languages are spoken worldwide by approximately 200 million people. The most widespread Turkic language is Turkish, spoken predominantly in Anatolia and the Balkans. Native speakers of Turkish make up about 38% of all Turkic-language speakers, while Uzbek stands out as the second most spoken Turkic language.
Features such as vowel harmony, agglutinative structure, subject-object-verb word order, and the absence of grammatical gender in the language can be regarded as fundamental features common to almost all Turkic languages. Within the Oghuz group, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai Turkic, Chaharmahal Turkic, Gagauz, and Balkan Gagauz, together with Crimean Tatar which bears Oghuz influence, can to a large extent understand one another at a moderate level. Other Turkic languages likewise show varying degrees of mutual intelligibility within their own subgroups. Although classification methods differ, the Turkic languages are generally divided into two main branches:
The Oghur group – of which only Chuvash survives today from this branch.
The Common Turkic group – which includes all the other Turkic languages.
An important feature that distinguishes the Turkic languages from other language families is that their speakers long lived as nomads and that, consequently, these languages have continually influenced one another. In addition to possessing a great many common words used with the same meaning, the Turkic languages also retain the same sentence structures throughout. They are also encountered under such designations as the contemporary Turkic written languages or the branches of the Turkic language. (See: the "Language" and "Dialect" debate.)
The Turkic languages show many similarities with the Mongolic languages, the Tungusic languages, the Koreanic languages, and the Japonic languages. These similarities have led some linguists (for example, the Turkologist Talât Tekin) to propose a superfamily called the Altaic language family; however, this view is rejected by the great majority of historical linguists. The similarities with the Uralic languages also, for a long time, caused these two language families to be treated as a single family under the Ural-Altaic hypothesis. But today there is not sufficient evidence to prove the existence of these two macro-families. The common features among the languages are today explained by extensive language contact that occurred in prehistoric times.
The Prehistoric Period
The homeland of the Turkic peoples and languages is proposed to be a region between the trans-Caspian steppes and Northeast Asia (Manchuria), and genetic evidence points to the region near Southern Siberia and Mongolia as the "Inner Asian Homeland" of Turkic ethnicity. Similarly, many linguists such as Juha Janhunen, Roger Blench, and Matthew Spriggs also propose present-day Mongolia as the homeland of the early Turkic language. The Turkologist Peter Benjamin Golden, on the basis of Proto-Turkic vocabulary items relating to climate, topography, flora, fauna, and people's modes of subsistence, places the Proto-Turkic Urheimat in the southern, taiga-steppe region of the Sayan-Altai area.
An intense contact took place between the Proto-Turks and the Proto-Mongols at approximately the first millennium BCE; the shared cultural tradition between the two Eurasian nomadic groups is called the Turco-Mongol tradition. The two groups shared a similar religious system, Tengrism, and there are a great many distinct loanwords between the Turkic languages and the Mongolic languages. Although the borrowings are two-directional, today the largest foreign component in the Mongolian vocabulary consists of Turkic loanwords.
Certain lexical similarities and structural commonalities between the Turkic languages and the Tungusic and Mongolic languages, as well as the similarities with Korean and Japanese, have in recent years been attributed to these languages being in contact with one another in prehistoric times. This interaction is sometimes called the "Northeast Asian linguistic area." However, a more recent contact process (around the 1st millennium BCE) encompassing the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages is considered separately from this. In this process there are shared words that passed mostly from Turkic into Mongolic, and then from Mongolic into Tungusic. The number of words borrowed from Turkic into Mongolic is quite large, but the number of words that passed from Mongolic into Turkic is far fewer. Moreover, Turkic and Tungusic do not have common words that are not found in Mongolic.
Early Written Records
The oldest known written records of the Turkic languages are the Orkhon inscriptions, found in 1889 in the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia and dated to the 8th century. These inscriptions were erected in the names of Bilge Kağan (731), Kül Tigin (732), and Tonyukuk (725), and are among the oldest literary texts of the Turkic written language. Two lines of a Hun lament recorded in the Chinese annals, along with a few words, give an idea of 4th-century Turkic.
The first comprehensive dictionary and grammar of the Turkic languages is the work titled Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk, written by Mahmud al-Kashgari in 1072 during the Karakhanid period. In addition to being a dictionary containing about 8,000 words, this work is a monumental folkloric source that also records the Turkic written languages and dialects and their cultural values. Mahmud al-Kashgari created this work by bringing together the vocabulary of the Karakhanid, Uyghur, Oghuz, Kipchak, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic tribes, and also added the first known map of the geographical distribution of the Turkic languages.
Another important work concerning the northwestern branch of the Turkic languages is the Codex Cumanicus, dated to the 12th–13th centuries. This work is a language guide between the Kipchak language and Latin, used between the Western Cumans living in present-day Hungary and Romania and Catholic missionaries. In addition, the oldest records of the language spoken by the Volga Bulgars, which is debated to be the mother tongue or a distant relative of Chuvash, extend back to the 13th–14th centuries.
Sources
- Turkish Wikipedia: tr.wikipedia.org
- English Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org