turkic language family
geography
the turkic languages are mostly spoken in the following geographical locations:
- turkey
- the former ussr + iran; specifically the caucasus and northwestern iran (azerbaijani), former soviet central asia, kazakhstan and southern siberia (uzbek, kazakh, turkmen, kirghiz/kyrgyz) and on the volga (tatar)
- yakut/sakha, spoken in northern siberia
- the turkic-speaking communities in northwestern china, who speak mostly uyghur, also kazakh
subfamilies
the major turkic subgroups are
- oghuz, which includes turkish from türkiye, also turkmen and azerbaijani
- kipchak, which includes kazakh, kyrgyz, tatar and bashkir (which is mainly spoken in the republic of bashkortostan located between the ural and volga)
- karluk, including uzbek and uyghur
- siberian, including sakha/yakut, tuvan (in southern-central siberia), northern altaic (this is actually not a language, but a collection of dialects spoken throughout the altai republic)
- oghur (also known as bulgar, not related to bulgarian however), not to be confused with oghuz, the only language of this subgroup that is not extinct is chuvash, which is spoken in the chuvash republic to the east of moscow
common features
turkic languages generally share the following features
- vowel harmony: this is common in many agglutinative languages. it means that vowels assimilate, meaning that the vowels of affixes will change according to the vowels of the stem/"main word", based on certain articulation features (for example, where the vowels are produced (front, back, high, low), and how they are pronounced (tongue position, rounding of lips)).
- agglutination: this means that words are made of morphemes, which each carry a syntactic feature.
except for the turkic languages, there are also- the uralic languages including hungarian, finnish and estonian, though estonian has been evolving into a fusional language
- most of the austronesian languages, such as malay, most languages spoken in the philippines (including tagalog), bahasa indonesia
- the dravidian languages, which are mainly spoken in the southern part of the indian subcontinent, including telugu, tamil and kannada
- the basque language
- korean
- japanese
- some native american languages, inuit languages
- they follow a subject-object-verb (sov) order
- use nominalized subordinate clauses
some maps to situate the turkic speaking regions
