ABSTRACT
West Old Turkic denotes Turkic varieties spoken in a macro-linguistic area, primarily in East and Middle Europe as well as on the Balkans from the fifth century up to the coming of the Mongols in the thirteenth century. The Volga Bulghar inscriptions from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century represent a Middle Turkic language of the Chuvash type. Contrary to East Old Turkic, which exhibits a huge number of written sources, West Old Turkic is scarcely documented. The hitherto discovered potential sources are very few in number and are fragmentary in nature. Since speakers of West Old Turkic had a great impact on local non-Turkic peoples, languages such as Hungarian, Finno-Ugric of the Volga region, and Slavic are invaluable sources for the better understanding of West Old Turkic. Besides some common words appearing in written sources, the known lexicon of West Old Turkic comprises proper names.
