ABSTRACT
A strict terminological distinction should be drawn between Turkic, the name of a language family, and Turkish, the name of a language. Although Turkish is by far the largest language (in terms of number of speakers) in the Turkic family, it accounts for only some 30 per cent of the total number of speakers of Turkic languages. The main geographic locations of Turkic languages are: (1) Turkey (Turkish), (2) the former USSR and Iran: the Caucasus and northwestern Iran (e.g. Azerbaijani), formerly Soviet Central Asia, Kazakhstan and southern Siberia (e.g. Uzbek, Kazakh, Turkmenian, Kirghiz) and on the Volga (e.g. Tatar). One Turkic language (Yakut, or Sakha, as it is called by its native speakers) is spoken in northern Siberia. (More than one inhabitant in ten of the formerly Soviet areas is a native speaker of a Turkic language.) In addition, there are substantial Turkic-speaking communities in northwestern China (especially Uighur, and also Kazakh). In terms of linguistic structure, the Turkic languages are very close to one another, and
most of the salient features of Turkish described below (e.g. vowel harmony, agglutinative morphology, verb-final word order, nominalised subordinate clauses) are true of nearly all Turkic languages, with only minor modifications. This similarity of structure makes it difficult to determine the precise number of Turkic languages and their boundaries and to sub-classify them, since one typically finds chains of dialects, with adjacent dialects in essence mutually intelligible and mutual intelligibility decreasing as a function of distance, rather than clear language boundaries. Only one Turkic language, Chuvash, spoken on the middle Volga, is radically different from all its relatives. The external genetic relationships of the Turkic family remain controversial. The
most widely accepted affiliation is with the Mongolian languages (in Mongolia, northern China and parts of the former USSR) and the Tungusic languages (Siberia and northeastern China), to form the Altaic phylum; the typological similarities among these three families, though striking (e.g. vowel harmony, SOV word order typology) are not proof of genetic relationship, while even the shared vocabulary has been argued
than would extend the Altaic phylum eastwards to include Korean, perhaps even Japanese; or northwards to include the Uralic family (to give a Ural-Altaic phylum). Turkish is the official and dominant language of Turkey (Turkish Republic), where it
is the native language of over 90 per cent of the population, i.e. some 70 million people. (The largest linguistic minority in the Turkish Republic is formed by Kurdish speakers, mainly in southeastern Turkey; small minority language communities are formed by speakers of Arabic, of some Caucasian languages, and, especially in the European part of the country, by speakers of Gagauz, a closely related Turkic language primarily spoken in Moldova.) Turkish is also a co-official language (with Greek) in Cyprus, where it is spoken by 18-19 per cent of the population, or about 140,000 people. But the largest number of Turkish speakers outside Turkey, perhaps close to one million, is to be found in the Balkans, especially in Bulgaria, but also in the former Yugoslavia (particularly in Macedonia) and in Greece. Although there is no general agreement in Turkological literature on the most adequate
geographic grouping of the Turkic languages, we shall go along with those sources that classify the contemporary language spoken in the Turkish Republic within a SouthWest (or Ocuz) group, together with Gagauz, Azerbaijani and Turkmenian, the latter forming the eastern component of the group. Within this group, some sources differentiate a subgroup called Osman (i.e. Ottoman), which would consist of the following dialects: Rumelian, Anatolian and South Crimean. Modern standard Turkish represents a standardisation of the Istanbul dialect of Anatolian. The question of the ancestor language of this group is not settled, either. It seems
established, however, that the language of the oldest documents (i.e. the Orkhun inscriptions and the Old Uighur manuscripts) is the ancestor of another group, namely of the Central Asiatic Turkic languages; the South-West languages are presumably descendants of the language of the ‘Western Türküt’ mentioned in the Chinese Annals. The ancient languages of this group would be Old Anatolian and Old Osman. These
labels themselves are misleading, however, and have more political and historical justification than linguistic motivation, since there are no clear-cut criteria to distinguish the languages they represent from one another – while there might be more reason to distinguish Old Osman (which is usually claimed to extend until the fifteenth century, ending with the conquest of Constantinople) from Ottoman proper; but, even there, no justification exists for a strict cut-off point. The first Anatolian Turkish documents date from the thirteenth century and show that
the literary tradition of Central Asia was only very tenuously carried over by the Turkish people (who had been converted to Islam earlier) after invading Anatolia from the east in the late eleventh century. It is clear that these tribes were influenced heavily by both Persian and Arabic from the very beginnings of their settling down in Anatolia, given the higher prestige and development of the culture and literature of these neighbouring Muslim nations. The number of works in Turkish written by the Turks of Anatolia (as opposed to those written by them in Arabic and Persian and even Greek) greatly increased in the fourteenth century, together with the Sel˚ˇuqi period of feudalism in Anatolia. The gap between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries with respect to the lack of written documents can probably be explained by assuming that the Turkish leaders used Arabic and Persian, not finding a local Turkic language in their new surroundings and not having a strong literary tradition to fall back on – given that these Turkish tribes (to a large extent belonging to the Ocuz) were not among the culturally
at time from the Central Asian centres of Turkic literature. From the very beginning of its Anatolian period, Turkish was written in the Arabic
script, until the Latin script was adopted in the course of the so-called ‘writing reform’ of 1928 (put into force in 1929), one of the various reforms introduced after the founding of the Turkish Republic with the aim of westernising the country. However, the Uighur script was also employed by the Anatolian Turks up to the fifteenth century, which might explain some features of the Arabic script as used by the Turks of that period and which differ from standard Arabic usage, e.g. vowels are written out in Turkish words. This point, incidentally, has often been brought up to motivate the so-called ‘writing reform’, arguing that the multiple ambiguities that arise in Turkish within a non-vocalised orthography made the Arabic system highly inadequate for Turkish. The dialect of the earliest Anatolian texts has various features in common with the
Ocuz dialect as documented for the eleventh century, before the migration to Anatolia, and with Qïpchaq (an ancient language of the Northwestern group) and Turkmenian. Some of these are listed below:
(1) d for t in Old Turkic. (A number of these ds became devoiced again through assimilation in the fifteenth century.)
(2) Initial b changes to v: bar-> var-‘to go; to arrive’; ber-> ver-‘to give’ (3) Suffix-initial c, g disappears (in most instances; there are some surviving suffixes
such as -gil, -gen, but those aren’t productive). (4) Word-final c, g disappears in polysyllabic words. (5) Instead of the second person plural imperative ending -ler, -lar in Old Turkic, the
forms -nüz, -nuz, -niz, -nız are found (and remain until today).
