Pre-history The homeland of the
Turkic peoples 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 and
Mongolia as the "Inner Asian Homeland" of the Turkic ethnicity. Similarly several linguists, including
Juha Janhunen,
Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs, suggest that modern-day Mongolia is the homeland of the
Proto-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 approximately during the
first millennium BC; the shared cultural tradition between the two
Eurasian nomadic groups is called the "
Turco-Mongol" 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 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.
Kul-chur inscription with the
Old Turkic alphabet ().
Töv Province, Mongolia Turkic languages also show some Chinese
loanwords that point to early contact during the time of Proto-Turkic.
Early written records '' ("Book of Divination") from
Dunhuang, written in
Old Uyghur language with the
Orkhon script, is an important
literary source for early
Turko-
Mongol mythology. The first established records of the Turkic languages are the
Orkhon inscriptions by the
Göktürks, recording the
Old Turkic language, which were discovered in 1889 in the
Orkhon Valley in Mongolia, and are dated to the eighth century AD. The
Compendium of the Turkic Dialects (''
Divânü Lügati't-Türk), written during the 11th century AD 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. The
Codex Cumanicus (12th–13th centuries AD) concerning the
Northwestern branch is another early linguistic manual, between the
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, debatably the parent or a distant relative of Chuvash language, are dated to the 13th–14th centuries AD.
Geographical expansion and development Buddhist inscription written in
Old Uyghur language with
Old Uyghur alphabet on the east wall of the
Cloud Platform at Juyong Pass With the
Turkic expansion during the
Early Middle Ages (c. 6th–11th centuries AD), Turkic languages, in the course of just a few centuries, spread across
Central Asia, from
Siberia to the
Mediterranean. Various terminologies from the Turkic languages have passed into
Persian,
Urdu,
Ukrainian,
Russian,
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. 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: •
Turkic •
Common Turkic •
Oghuz Turkic (Southwestern) •
Kipchak Turkic (Northwestern) •
Karluk Turkic (Southeastern) •
Siberian Turkic (Northeastern) •
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. 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.
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 ==