ABSTRACT
Introduction Within all the scholarly disciplines comprised by the designation Turcology, study of language variation can be regarded as the oldest one. Thanks to MaI:unüd al Käsyarl and his extraordinary work Compendium 0/ the Turkic Dialects, we have a remarkably detailed picture of the different dialects and languages spoken by Turkic tribes in the eleventh century (see pp. 23-4). Nevertheless, dialectology in its modern sense, i.e. the study of local variation within one particular language, has been a neglected field within Turcology. Considering the fact that the Republic of Turkey until quite recently was the only country within the vast Turkic-speaking areas of the world with a Turkic variety as its national language, it could be expected that at least Anatolian dialectology would be a field where a lot of research could be done by the Turks themselves. Unfortunately this is not the case.
