ABSTRACT
The Turkic varieties of Iran are closely related, except offshoots of Turkmen spoken in northeastern Iran near the border of Turkmenistan, and the central Khalaj, which has retained archaic features from early isolation. A few Turkic texts mostly in the Chaghatay tradition were composed from the mid-fifteenth century on, when a written form of Turkic started to develop in Iran. The varieties to be studied in the following are those spoken in Iran with comparison to the Afshar dialect of Kabul, Afghanistan. The phonetics and phonology of Iran-Turkic are influenced by regional contact languages. A few varieties have a new periphrastic form for the focal present that imitates the Iranian model, perhaps a strategy to avoid the blurred differentiation between aorist and focal present of the Azeri type. Settlement history has encouraged numerous contact-induced language changes at the intra-Turkic level, but characteristic developments also reflect the input of neighboring non-Turkic, mostly Iranian, languages and areal convergence.
