ABSTRACT
Turkmen is close to Khorasan Oghuz and together with it forms an East Oghuz subbranch. Regarding the systematic maintenance of Proto-Turkic primary long vowels, Turkmen forms a subgroup of Turkic together with Yakut and Khalaj. Turkmen exhibits several areal typological commonalities with the Kipchak and Karluk Turkic languages in Central Asia. Phonemic distinctions are neutralized after the prime syllables. As a result of progressive assimilations due to the palatal and labial harmony, suffixes have allomorphs depending on the quality of the preceding syllable. Progressive or regressive assimilations of adjacent consonants are a further source of morphophonological variations both in and after prime syllables. Stem-final and suffix-initial consonants widely assimilate each other regarding various phonological features. Turkmen is highly characterized by secondary vowel lengthening due to the contractions at morpheme boundaries involving stem-final and suffix-initial phonemes. Turkmen has several bound morphemes used as participant nominals in relative clauses or as action nominals in complement clauses.
