The constitute a
Language Family of some thirty languages, spoken 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 .
2
Turkic languages are spoken by some 180 million people as a native language; 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.
See Also: Altaic languages
The characteristic features of the Turkic languages are
Vowel Harmony , extensive
Agglutination by means of
Suffix es, and lack of
Noun Class es 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 .
]]
across Eurasia]]
See Also: Proto-Turkic language
Turkic peoples
The 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
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.
3
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 .
With 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 .
4
- d). However, there are many details for which debate is still ongoing.
The Turkic languages may uncontroversially be divided into six branches:
#Southwestern (
Oghuz )
#Northwestern (
Kypchak )
#Southeastern (
Uzbek ,
Uyghur )
#Northeastern (Siberian Turkic)
#
Oghur-Turkic
#
Arghu Turkic
With less certainty, the Southwestern, Northwestern, Southeastern and Oghur groups may further be summarized as , the Northeastern, Kyrgyz-Kypchak and Arghu (Khalaj) groups as '''East Turkic'''.
6
Geographically and linguistically, the languages of Southwestern, Northwestern, and Southeastern subgroup belong to the central Turkic languages, while the Northeastern and Khalaj languages are the so-called peripheral languages.
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