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The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe and Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are traditionally considered to be part of the Altaic language family.[1][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.[2]
The 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.
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 (Ottoman Turkish: 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, Russian, Chinese and to a lesser extent, Arabic.[4]
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.[5] 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 genetic classification of the Turkic languages commonly followed today is the one by Samoilovich (mainly based on the development of *d). However, there are many details for which debate is still ongoing.
The Turkic languages may uncontroversially be divided into six branches:
With less certainty, the Southwestern, Northwestern, Southeastern and Bulghar groups may further be summarized as West Turkic, the Southeastern, Kyrgyz-Kypchak and 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.
¹Crimean Tatar and Urum are historically Kypchak languages, but have been so heavily influenced by Oghuz languages that it is difficult to classify them definitively as either Oghuz or Kypchak.
²Aini is a mixed language with Uyghur grammar and Persian vocabulary, and is spoken exclusively by adult men, almost as a cryptolect.
³Khalaj is surrounded by Oghuz languages, but exhibits a number of features that classify it as non-Oghuz.
The following is a brief comparison 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 the word is formed from another stem and is not a cognate with the rest of the words in the row. Forms are given in native Latin orthographies unless otherwise noted.