14 Facts About Turkic languages

Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia, and Western Asia.

The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from Mongolia to Northwest China, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium.

Turkic languages are spoken natively by some 200 million people, and the total number of Turkic speakers, including second language speakers, is over 230 million.

Turkic languages show many similarities with the Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic languages.

Similarities with the Uralic Turkic languages even caused these families to be regarded as one for a long time under the Ural-Altaic hypothesis.

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However, there has not been sufficient evidence to conclude the existence of either of these macrofamilies, the shared characteristics between the Turkic languages being attributed presently to extensive prehistoric language contact.

Turkic languages are null-subject languages, have vowel harmony, extensive agglutination by means of suffixes and postpositions, and lack of grammatical articles, noun classes, and grammatical gender.

Turkic languages show some Chinese loanwords that point to early contact during the time of Proto-Turkic.

The Compendium of the Turkic languages Dialects, written during the 11th century AD by Kasgarli Mahmud of the Kara-Khanid Khanate, constitutes an early linguistic treatment of the family.

The Compendium is the first comprehensive dictionary of the Turkic languages and includes the first known map of the Turkic speakers' geographical distribution.

Various terminologies from the Turkic languages have passed into Persian, Hindustani, Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese, Mongolian, Hungarian and to a lesser extent, Arabic.

Geographical distribution of Turkic languages-speaking peoples across Eurasia since the Ottoman era ranges from the North-East of Siberia to Turkey in the West.

Centuries, the Turkic-speaking peoples have migrated extensively and intermingled continuously, and their languages have been influenced mutually and through contact with the surrounding languages, especially the Iranian, Slavic, and Mongolic languages.

Turkic languages is one of the main members of the controversial Altaic language family.