ABSTRACT
Some thirteenth to fifteenth-century Turkic texts show linguistic features characteristic both of Western Oghuz Turkic, spoken between the Caspian and the Adriatic seas, and of Central Asian Turkic. The name olga-bolga dili, already given to this variety in the fifteenth century, exemplifies two of these features, the alternation of Western Oghuz ol- with Common Turkic bol- "to become, be, ripen" and the use of Common Turkic. However, the thirteenth and fourteenth-century use of Oghuz Turkic for writing was by no means limited to Anatolia and Rumelia. The emergence of literary Anatolian and Rumelian Turkish on the one hand, and literary Chaghatay on the other, created two distinct norms. The olga-bolga chaos is "General Oghuz Turkic"; it should not be looked at as confusion, rather as the permissiveness of the written language mirroring a general climate of dialect variation resulting both from a mobility of speakers and from a diffusion of texts written by speakers of different Oghuz dialects.
