Turkic languages

The Turkic languages are a group of closely related languages that are spoken by a variety of people distributed across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China. The Turkic languages are considered by some linguists to be part of the Altaic language family. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish. Turkic languages are agglutinative and exhibit phonological vowel harmony. Though various different Turkic tribes and their languages have mixed with each other throughout centuries, making a classification extremely difficult, a very simplified classification could be as follows:

• Southwestern languages:
• *Oghuz group: Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Gagauz, Crimean Turkish, Qashqai, Selchuk, Urum
• *Khorasan group
• Northwestern languages: (or Kypchak group)
• *Aralo-Caspian: Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Karakalpak, Nogai)
• *Ponto-Caspian: Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk, Karaim, Crimean Tatar, Judeo-Crimean Tatar, Pecheneg (extinct), Cuman (extinct)
• *Uralian: Tatar, Bashkir, Chulym
• Northern languages:
• *Siberian group: Altai, Khakas, Shor, Tuvin, Yakut
• Eastern languages:
• *Uighur-Chagatai group: Uzbek, Uighur, Chagatai
• Bolgar (or Hunnic) languages: (sometimes considered to be a separate Altaic subfamily)
• *Chuvash, Bolgar (extinct and the inclusion of Bolgar in the Turkic language group is disputed), Khazar (extinct)

Various elements have passed to Turkic languages especially from Chinese, Persian, Russian and Arabic languages, and various elements from Turkic languages have been carried as far as southeastern Asia, the northernmost territories of Russia, and even North America.

See also

• Orkhon script
• Turkic peoples
• Historical linguistics
• Language families and languages

External links

• Map of Turkic languages
• Dmoz.org/../Languages/Altaic/Turkic/

• Türk Dili

Category:Altaic languages Category:Languages

ast:Llingües túrciques de:Turksprachen eo:Tjurka lingvaro fr:Langues turques io:Turka lingui nl:Turkse talen ja:テュルク諸語 pl:Języki tureckie fi:Turkkilaiset kielet tt:Törki tellär zh:突厥语族 az:Türk qrupu Category:Language families

View Live Article.
This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under GNU FDL