Talk:Turkic languages/Archive 1

Archive 1

Proto-Bulgar?

Where man read proto-Bulgar it seams more correctly proto-Bolgar? —Ludor 14:47, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

Classification of Oghuric

The statement that Oghuric is "sometimes considered to be a separate Altaic subfamily" shows a misconceptualisation of how language classification works. Most commonly, Oghuric and the other Turkic languages are two branches which are grouped together in one branch of Altaic. That is, it's considered a separate branch from the other Turkic languages, but is still considered closely enough related to be grouped with them away from the rest of Altaic. Viz:

• Altaic > ( Turkic₁ > (Oghuric > (Bolğar, etc), Turkic₂ > (…)), … )

—Firespeaker 05:31, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

External links

I think that this article should have links relating only to the Turkic family in general. Links relating to the individual languages, Uighur, Kazak, etc., should be placed instead on the specific article about the language. If there are no objections, I will remove these overly-specific links. CRCulver 01:07, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Chulym/Classification Tree

Hi everyone. I've just noticed that Chulym is listed under "East Turkic", as opposed to Ethnologue where it's listed under "Western Turkic".

In fact, while we're at it, the entire classification over at Ethnologue looks quite different from what we've got here.

Can someone provide any clarifications? Thanks.
--Schwallex 17:59, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

From what I've seen of Chulym, it's remarkably similar to Shor and Khakas, using the word adak for foot, as opposed to ayak, as is used in Tatar, Turkish, etc. I think the Russian term Chulym Tatar is what caused the confusion. While the Ethnologue classification is correct up to a certain point, there are a number of classifications that seem to be made on the basis of geographic location (such as calling everything spoken in China an Eastern Turkic/Karluk language) or ethnic name (such as classifying every language called a type of Tatar language with Tatar). Straughn 21:49, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Uyghur weirdness

Is this right? Uyghur is listed as a member of the Chagatay (Southeastern, Karluk) group, but then listed as its very own group under East Turkic. Are these referring to the same thing, same language, or different things? pfctdayelise (translate?) 09:27, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

I believe that the Uyghur branch listed under East Turkic refers to Old Uyghur, which was a different language spoken under the Uyghur Empire. New Uyghur, the Karluk language, is not related to that language, but the people who speak New Uyghur live in approximately the same area and are a sort of successor to the Uyghur Empire. Straughn 15:06, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Template

I've created a template for use on pages on Turkic languages, as has been done for many of the Indo-European language families:

What do you think? Too much information? Straughn 20:54, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

It's not very clear. What do pluses mean? The groups should be more clearly delineated. pfctdayelise (translate?) 11:45, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

I am confused that there is a distinct "Afshar language" term. Here in Turkey, Afshars speak a normal Anatolian Turkish, like other people in Turkey belonging to various Oghuz branches. Calling it as if a different language from Turkish seems weird to me. I guess, the classification is confused because of the existence of Afshar people, also in Iran. --Firez2006 22:36, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

İQTElif

The article İQTElif seems like original research. I tried contacting its main editor, User:Ultranet, but he didn't reply.

I'm thinking of proposing it for deletion, because i couldn't find any actual use for this orthography - most supporters of Latin Tatar seem to use Zamanalif (please, correct me if i'm wrong!). However that article does seem to have some useful linguistic information. Can anyone extract the useful information from it? I am not an expert in Turkic languages.

Thanks. --Amir E. Aharoni 07:21, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Pronunciations of sample words

Do we have pronunciations of the sample words, especially for the ones in Chuvash language ? Thanks --deniz 06:00, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Crimea and Lithuania are missing on the map

Crimea is missing on the map of Turkic languages. The Crimean Tatars use a dialect that's very close to the Turkish language used in Turkey, probably having its roots in the Khazar or Bulgar Turkic language.

Also, in Lithuania and parts of the eastern Baltic Sea coast, there is a Turkic language (Karay) used by the Karaim (Karaite) people, who are actually related to the Crimean Tatars and are probably also the descendants of the Khazars.

Regards Flavius Belisarius 05:56, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

(If you perhaps haven't noticed it, please note that we have an article about the Crimean Tatar language. There is also a running test for the Crimean Tatar Wikipedia on the Incubator.) Could you please clarify which map you are talking about? If you mean the official recognition map with blue colors (uploaded by me), I remember spending a few hours to locate a clear information about its official recognition and coming to the conclusion that it has no official status since 1944. To my knowledge, no Turkic language has official status in Lithuania. I notice that Crimea and southern Lithuania are marked by the geological distribution of Turkic speakers map (the ugly yellow one, which was subject to a war-like debate in the past), but it fails to mark any point on the Baltic coast. I think there is an urgent need to produce a new, better looking, and solidly referenced map in place of this yellow map. I would be more than happy to help produce a new map if anyone can provide a reliable published source on which such a map can be based. Atilim Gunes Baydin 14:51, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

Classification here vs. Ethnologue

This article cites Ethnologue as the source, but the classification here is completely different from the Ethnologue tree.

Ethnologue has Bolgar, Eastern, Northern, Southern and Western.

The classification here is "uncontroversially":

• Southwestern (Oghuz)
• Northwestern (Kypchak)
• Southeastern (Uyghur)
• Northeastern (Siberian Turkic)
• Chuvash (Oghur, Bulghar/Bolgar)
• Khalaj (Arghu)

And the grouping of languages is different too. Ethnologue puts Altay together with Tuvin and here they are separate.

I'm totally confused. --Amir E. Aharoni 14:21, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I have tried to answer your query in note 8 of the main article. Noula69 16:39, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Alternative representation of the family tree

Hi, I've been working on the following table (it took about two hours to code by hand) as a better visual representation of the existing classification. I think it makes it a lot easier to recognize relations and group memberships, but I decided not to push it into the article without hearing some comments. So, I will be very pleased to hear your remarks and ideas about this one. Regards, Atilim Gunes Baydin 06:25, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Proto-Turkic	Southwestern (Oghuz)	Pecheneg (extinct)
		Western	Turkish
			Azeri
			Gagauz
			Ottoman Turkish (extinct)
		Eastern	Turkmen
			Khorasani Turkish
		Southern	Afshar
			Qashqai
			Salar
		Crimean Tatar¹
		Urum¹
	Northwestern (Kypchak)	Kipchak (extinct)
		Western
			Karachay-Balkar
			Kumyk
			Karaim
			Kypchak-Cuman	Cuman (extinct)
				Krymchak
		Northern	Kypchak-Bolgar	Tatar
				Bashkir
				Baraba
		Southern (Aralo-Kaspian)	Kypchak-Nogay	Kazakh
				Karakalpak
				Nogay
			Kyrgyz-Kypchak	Kyrgyz
				Altay
		Crimean Tatar¹
		Urum¹
	Southeastern (Uyghur)	Old Turkic (extinct)
		Chagatay (extinct)
		Western	Uzbek
		Eastern	Uyghur	Aini²
			Lop
			Ili Turki
	Northeastern (Siberian)	Northern	Sakha / Yakut
			Dolgan
		Southern	Tuvan
			Khakas
			Shor
			Fuyü Gïrgïs
			Chulym
			Tofa
			Western Yugur
	Bolgar	Khazar (extinct)
		Bolgar (extinct)
		Hunnic (extinct)
		Chuvash
	Khalaj³

with all due respect I do not think your subclassification of Oghuz as accurate. Slalar is distantfrom Qasqai, while Qashqai, Afshar and Azeri are close to each other. Khorani Turkic is closer to Afshar than to Turkmen. And Azeri is closer to Afshar and Qashqai than either to Turkish or lets stand Gagauz. Babakexorramdin 14:35, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

It seems great, far better than the existing one in the article. You can prefer the cross (†) sign instead of writing extinct if you'd like to. Teşekkürler, iyi çalışmalar... Chapultepec 10:06, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Notes: The border on top of "Karachay-Balkar" is thicker than the rest. Chapultepec 10:10, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

It's very nice. I would consider putting Ottoman Turkish in the "Western Oghuz" box, and Old Turkic in the "Southeastern (Uyghur)" one to add diachronic depth to the table. dab (𒁳) 14:31, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

I moved Ottoman Turkish under Wester Oghuz. Old Turkic already seems to be under Southeastern (Uyghur), am I wrong? Atilim Gunes Baydin 16:43, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

The table is a good idea. The list in the article is difficult to read. I think it would be important in both the table and the article to emphasize that the most accepted classification scheme for Turkic languages doesn't reflect language descent, unlike such classification schemes in other language families. For example, having Old Turkic in the list like it is now can be confusing because it looks like it was a separate branch that died out instead of being a direct ancestor of several other modern Turkic languages that may no longer be grouped together. There must be some way to show this... I'm reminded of an old chart showing this information for UNIX which I'll try to dig up. Check out too this link. [1] --Stacey Doljack Borsody 18:16, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Thank you all for the input. I'm actually waiting for an opportunity to check the current classification of the family from a reputable linguistics book (I've made a request from the library for Johanson's Turkic Languages). The article currently gives no specific references for the matter. After being sure of the details of the family tree, I can perhaps also make a representation of the tree as an image file. Having another image like the one on the link you've given would also be very good. As for unix, do you mean something like the family tree of unix-like operating systems? That's interesting. Atilim Gunes Baydin 23:02, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

The link I gave is from Johanson and Csato.  ;) The point I'm trying to make is you won't find the extinct Turkic languages on it because of the historical divergence and convergence that has occurred within the Turkic family. So linguists currently use a classification system based more upon the geography of the modern languages. The article on Wikipedia here tries to stick the extinct languages onto it in a confused and unsuccessful way. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 23:51, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Factual Accuracy of Members section

"The classification is not accurate and seems very odd" Does anyone know what Babakexorramdin is talking about? He has provided no details. Babakexorramdin, stop adding tags for which you do not discuss on the talk page. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 22:24, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

see this:

with all due respect I do not think your subclassification of Oghuz as accurate. Slalar is distantfrom Qasqai, while Qashqai, Afshar/ Khorasani Turkic and Azeri are close to each other. Khorani Turkic is closer to Afshar than to Turkmen. And Azeri is closer to Afshar and Qashqai than either to Turkish or lets stand Gagauz. Babakexorramdin 14:35, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

To be short: Afshar, Qashqai, Azeri as well as other Oghuz languages in Iran such as Pichaqchi etc... (except Turkmen) are in one group. It is absurd to suggest that Azeri is in the one group with Turkish but Salar is in the same group with Qashqai. The classification represented in the page is contested and moreover there is no citations to any authoriatative source. And if this matters, i can tell you that I have knowledge of Qashqai at native level Babakexorramdin 17:26, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I took a quick look at http://www.turkiclanguages.com/www/classification.html to see where Salar is. You're right. We'll have to fix it. I don't know who made the original entries in the Members section or where they got their information from. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 23:24, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I believe that this classification was just personal opinion of someone. What I suggest is to put Azeri, Afshar/Khorasani Turkic, Shahsevan and Qashqai in one oghuz subgroup, Turkmen in the other and Turkich/Ottoman in the other. Languages such as Gagauz and Iraqi Turcoman remain undetermined. I have not much information about them, but they sound like Turkish. I have heared Iraqi Turcoman language and it has some traits of Turkish (especially the way Kurds speak) and some similarities with Azeri. But its pronounciation has influences from Arabic and is very different that Azeri. Babakexorramdin, 07:28, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm working on a new chart based upon the classification by Johnson 1998. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 18:06, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Input welcome on the new table. A nod to Atilim Gunes Baydin for the idea of making a table in the first place. I tried to design it so that it is easy to add/delete/edit langauges without having to mess too much with the table formatting by keeping them in a list. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 21:53, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Well I know that professor and I respect him, but still I do not agree on the Oghuz classification. It is not a clearcut situation. One language has similarities with one, but also some other similarities with the other. Something else is how can it be that Afshar is in different subgroup than Khorasani Turkic, when a major component of Khorasani Turkic dialects is Afshar? I will see if there are other classifications to which can be referred. It is a 'thing' that wikipedia needs external sources, otherwise hearing the natives of these languages talk was a better idea.--Babakexorramdin 07:10, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I can't comment too well since I don't have the book which may describe the reasons for the classification, only the website. But I think you have to realize that this classification of the Turkic language family isn't based upon historical descent such as you may be used to seeing in an Indo-European language family chart. It is based upon how similar the languages are NOW. You wrote that Afshar is a major component of Khorasani Turkic, but the developments in Khorasani Turkic may have changed it enough that it is closer to Turkmen than to Afshar. The same situation happens with Kyrgyz, which is historically closer to Yenisei Turkic, but now can be classified together with Kazakh. This is why the chart shows Proto-Turkic and then the languages, why the Kipchak languages aren't shown as being descended from Kipchak directly, why Yellow Uyghur and Salar are grouped where they are, etc. I have to add, I'm not actually sure Old Turkic and Chagatay should be listed where they are. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 14:43, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I based my claims exactly on the basis of how languages are now. Turkmens being Sunni are not in a position to influence or assimilate other groups. Moreover we should realize that tribal languages such as Afshar and Shahsevan could be and are spoken differently in different regions of Iran. Azeri turkic has assimilated them in northwestern Iran but they still retain their characteristics as long as their speakers speak them. In the case of Khorasani Turkic the language which has had the greatest impact on them, and is in a position that can absorb it is Persian and defintely not Turkmen. --Babakexorramdin 22:14, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Map of Turkic-speaking countries and autonomous areas.

Map of Turkic-speaking countries and autonomous areas.

This map is very inaccurate. It mentiones Kosovo has the official language of Turkish (Turkish of Turkey). It is obvious that Kosovo speaks Albanian and Serbian. Babakexorramdin 14:29, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Hi, to my knowledge, Turkish is the third official language of Kosovo (possibly only in one or several districts, like Prizren) together with Serbo-Croatian and Albanian. I don't currently have time to edit the article with proper references, but I just wanted to drop by and make the point. One trustable online source I've come up with in a quick search right now is: [2] (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe). Also see this online news site [3]. This issue should be clarified with an authoritative source, and updates should be made in the Turkish language article and other places for consistency. Atilim Gunes Baydin 16:39, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

What I read was that Serbian, Albanian and Turkish were official language in the municipality of prizren together with Bosnian and other smaller languages. It is very vague and does not say any thing about its status in Kosovo. I am aware of the fact that The Turkish right wing politicians wanted that Turkish becomes the/a offical language in kosovo, but it never happened. moreover as the status of Kosovo is undetermined nothing is official in kosvo. Serbian constitution clearly does not states Turkish as an official language. However I will appreciate it if you give can cite some reliable sources which could shed light on this issue. ~

Moreover the Iranian constitution says that Persian is the official language in Iran, and akll the other languages of Iran ..... etc.... makes many Turkic languages as official in Iran and you could color Iran in your map too. I think Turkish has such a status (but of different nature)in Kosovo. I think these cases should be called recognized but not offical. The Iranian case is even constitutional so you can call it constituinally recognized languages.--Babakexorramdin 20:19, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Father in kazakh language

in kazakh language "ata" means not father, but grand-father, and father is called "ake"

In Turkish of Turkey "ata" means father and grandfather or more; ancestor. Also "eke" means old person. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.233.10.59 (talk) 04:37, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Turkmens in Iraq

I think the map is wrong. There are millions of Turkmen (Oghuz) Turks in North Iraq in cities like Musul, Kerkuk, Suleymaniye and Telafer but its not shown in the map. Huseyinalb 26 July 2006

There are definite issues with the map -- it's generally right, but in certain places doesn't match up with what the Ethnologue says or what a lot of my own sources say. I'll make it a point to begin work on a better one. Straughn 13:48, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Or the fact that most of South-Eastern Turkey is Kurdish-speaking. But perhaps we'd better not open that can of worms. Sikandarji 17:01, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

People are speaking Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish at that region. You cant easily throw the official language out. Maps can collide with each other, there are lots of families that are fix of that nationalities there. I think you have some other things in your mind and you want to talk about it but this is not the place. As Thelorien mentioned we re talking about turkic languages. Also there are lots of Turkish people at east thrace and bulgaria. Theyve representatives at parliaments of that countries. I think that regions should be added too.Huseyinalb 25 October 2010

Firstly, we're not discussing Kurdish here, so don't just give an unrelated example to support your opinions. That's one thing. The second thing is, I believe that what Huseyinalb has stated is very correct since there are many people who speak Turkish in Northern Iraq. I agree with him that it should be shown in the map. Northern Iraq has been an important place for Turks and Turkish language for more than a thousand years adn this fact is worth mentioning. Thelorien 18:12, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

There are many wrongs in map. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgizistan vs. must be yellow-painted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.27.149.175 (talk) 13:32, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

template is inaccurate

[edit] West vs. East Turkic I think this distinction is a bit imprecise. I do not understand why Kypchak languages are grouped into western Turkic. If I do understand it, however, ther is certainly no ground in calling Chuvash a Western Turkic language. It is better not to distinguish western or Eastern groups. Oghuz, Qarluq and to a lesser extent Kypchak languages are influenced by Iranian languages. Those languages in Siberia plus Chuvash have undergone no or much less influences from the Iranian languages. Tha makes them different other wise these are all languages belonging to separate branches of Turkic. Something else is that in Iran still some kind of Turkic is spoken which has undergone infleunces from Oghuz Turkic and Persian, but nevertheless is not a Western Turkic language. That is Khalaj.--Babakexorramdin (talk) 10:24, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Turkic-speaking_regions"--Babakexorramdin (talk) 10:26, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

proto-Bulgar

The correct if proto-Bulgar and no, it is NOT a Turkic language. The Bulgars moved to Europe in the II c. from West China/Central Asia (Pamir, Hindukush) and spoke an Indo-European language related to Old Persian.

--anon by User:128.42.216.56 2005 Nov 02

That is one theory and it is an extreme minority view. --Briangotts (talk) 15:01, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Considering the amount of mixing of Turks and Iranians (comparable populations in Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, etc), and the linguistics effects of this (many Turkic languages are highly Persianized, and many Iranian languages are Turkicized), it wouldn't surprise me if the Bolgars included both Turks and Iranians. If that were the case, there might be a Bolgar Turk and a Bolgar Pamir language. However, when using just the name 'Bolgar', most authors expect their audience to understand Bolgar Turkic. kwami 19:19, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

== bulgarians has turkish origin plese understand it!!! == —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.227.104.239 (talk) 17:12, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

No, you are wrong. The Bulgarian language is a Slavic Indo-European language. Bulgar is a Turkic language, but that is a totally different language than Bulgarian. (Taivo (talk) 18:22, 29 June 2008 (UTC))

Vocabulary comparisons mistakes

Some of the word in English are translated incorrectly. For earth most of the Turkic words used actually stand for sand . For the word tree, some of the Turkic translations used are correct but some actually stand for wood, and most of the translations for sky actually stand for blue, although few of the languages actually use the same word for both meanings. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.243.173.66 (talk) 22:35, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

To add , the Azeri language has many dialects and it has many elements form Persian , so the Azeri word for Tent that is Çadır maybe add to the table , but the problem is that the word is Persian and should not be mentioned in this table for "comparison of cognates" . The word is of cognates via Persian and not because Turkic root.Same about Köpek that perhaps is a Median Iranic word for dog .In the mid-5th century BCE,Herodotus (Histories 1.110) noted that spaka is the Median word for a female dog. This term and meaning are preserved in living Iranic languages such as Talyshi.--Alborz Fallah (talk) 09:36, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Göy in Azeri may also means green and also some of the green herbs. --Alborz Fallah (talk) 09:42, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Classification

There's been a lot of recent change to the classification of the Turkic languages. While presenting one theory (the commonly accepted one) is not only great, but a breath of fresh air, it might be good to include some information on the other theories as well.

Also, the classification currently presented leaves out some of the finer-grained subcategorisations that were available in older versions. As I understand it, the theory currently presented isn't concerned with those, so wouldn't present a relevant breakdown; perhaps another scholarly source should be queried for the finer-grained groupings.

—Firespeaker 08:19, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

You are probably thinking of the inclusion of Oghuric as a separate branch of Turkic which is coming back into its own as the best alternative to explaining the r - l differentiation of thesee language from Common Turkic z - s¸. Noula69 17:03, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

From Darkstar: How much longer is this Khalaj craziness is going to stay in there? Who says Khalaj is more (or just as) archaic and significant as Chuvash? Doerfer? Well, let Doerfer think again. Baskakov's classification was much more responsible. But I'm not going to change anything. Let someone else fix it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.234.48.144 (talk) 12:56, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Fergana Kypchak Language

It's a language closely similar to Kyrgyz, to my great regret, hardly described. http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ферганско-кыпчакский_язык Please write an article on it. Антиромантик (talk) 14:52, 20 April 2009 (UTC)Антиромантик

Vocabulary

Vocabulary, which is not mentioned in the list of common features, is not shared with Mongol and others. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.194.34.71 (talk) 14:59, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Some Turkish vocabulary is given under "Vocabulary Comparison", but not under

"Characteristics". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.137.170.8 (talk) 11:40, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Arabic and Persian Influence

All Turkic languages are influenced by Arabic and Persian. There is a great relationship between theses 3 languages. This article need a new section. Influence (which languages are influenced by Turkic) and which languages influenced Turkic? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Khorasani-Man (talk • contribs) 00:43, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

not all, but most. Those Turkic languages which is spoken by the real Turks in siberia, are almost pure and do not have many borrowings from Persian, Arabic, Greek etc...--Babakexorramdin (talk) 12:57, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

It shall also be taken into consideration that the modern Persian vocabulary is about 60% Arabic, and the contemporary Iranian state appeared only in 16th century with the rise of Safavid Shia Turkic dynasty. Atabəy (talk) 01:40, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

"Turkmen" comes from the iranian word torkmand/torkman which in persian means "they became turk" ie they(the iranians of central asia)have been turkified.

"Turkmen" comes from the iranian word torkmand/torkman which in persian means "they became turk" ie they(the iranians of central asia)have been turkified.

john L.Drake —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.188.81.84 (talk) 17:27, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

This is just your will. No evidence of such a thing. I know persian very well "torkman" or "turkamand" doesn’t mean such thing! This post is ethnocentric. Amir.azeri (talk) 12:22, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Well I speak both Persian and Turkic. The anonymous user has a point. --Babakexorramdin (talk) 12:55, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Anonymous user does not make sense, what is meant by "Iranians of Central Asia"? There is no such ethnicity as "Iranians", this is a common definition for variety of cultures and ethnic groups inhabiting the geographical area known as Iranian plateau. In modern times, it's also a definition of citizenship, which geographically has nothing to do with Central Asia either. I am not sure if Wikipedia is a place for such irredentist revisionism. Atabəy (talk) 01:36, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Do not complain about irredentism if 1- you do not know what the word means 2- you yourself are an advocate of irredentism.--Babakexorramdin (talk) 17:28, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Turkish is spoken in southeastern anatolia and northern iraq (Turkmen Turkish)

I know because i am living here. Noone can claim that this place is not for Turkish. The map here is completely wrong. Maverick16 (talk) 21:39, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

"You know" is not acceptable as a Reliable Source, which is what Wiki is based on. The majority Armenians/Kurds that live in those areas don't use it as a first-language.

More languages

What about the Kipchak language?

Also, perhaps the New Kypchak language deserves mentioning somewhere below.--Imz 12:21, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I have also read in other sources that Finnish may be a member of the broad Altay-ural family of languages; this might be worth mentioning and expanding upon. Oliver. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.32.49.157 (talk) 18:07, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

No, Ural-Altaic enjoyed acceptance in the past, but nowadays has been discredited. Even the Altaic language family is controversial nowadays. --JorisvS (talk) 18:39, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Indo-European roots in comparison table?

Under the heading "Vocabulary comparison", some words appear which seem to have an Indo-Iranian origin and would thus not be informative of the development and interrelations of Turkic languages. The ones I have found are: "Avaz" (= voice), which is claimed to have a Persian origin (آواز) in Wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avaz) - cfr Latin "vox" (however this word is basically the same in all Turkic languages listed); and "çadir" (= tent) reasonably genetically linked to Persian "chador چادور" which also has counterparts in Indian languages (http://www.wordnik.com/words/chador). Anyone care to comment? Wdanbae (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 20:00, 10 October 2010 (UTC).

Controversiality of Altaic

The opposition of linguists to the Altaic hyposthesis should not be overrated since most linguists adher to it. Even the inclusion of Japanese and Korean has found wide acceptance. Noula69 13:56, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

No, you are wrong. The vast majority of linguists do not accept the Altaic hypothesis as a genetic unit, but as a Sprachbund. (Taivo (talk) 18:21, 29 June 2008 (UTC))

Why Altaic is a Sprachbund?71.201.63.99 (talk) 19:29, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Because the languages are not demonstrably genetically related, but share certain features as a result of borrowing and diffusion amongst them. --Taivo (talk) 20:32, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Inaccuracy in the Vocabulary Comparison section

The word avaz/awaz "sound" is a Persian loanword rather than a native Turkic word, so citing it in the "Vocabulary Comparison" section does not appear correct. As is known, loanwords in Turkic languages typically do not obey the regular language-to-language correspondences.

Also, the big Kazakh-Russian dictionary does not have it, so the cited Kazakh form avaz looks dubious. Borovi4ok —Preceding unsigned comment added by Borovi4ok (talk • contribs) 16:27, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

In Turkish, the word for "sound" is "ses" but not "avaz". AFAIK, "avaz" is Persian. there is also word "tını" for "timbre". Anatolian Turkish "ses" (sound in English) are depicted below for some other Turkish dialects (I also added two more words to compare):

English	Anatolian Turkish	Azeri	Türkmen	Başkırt	Kazak	Kırgız	Özbek	Tatar	Uygur
Sound	ses	ses	ses	tavıs	dıbıs	dobuş	tavuş	tavıs	tavuş
Voice	ün	?	?	ön	?	ün	ün	?	?
vocalic	ünlü	?	?	ön	?	ündü	ünli	?	?

I couldn't find some of them and put "?" instead. Thus, "avaz" must be removed. --98.196.232.128 (talk) 04:00, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

You Must Add the Sumerian Langueage in the Text

Today,It was proved by Prof.Dr.Muazzez İlmiye Çığ that the Sumerians were anchestors of the Turks.She told this in her book with a lot of evidences ( Flood in Sumerians-Turks in Flood )

Some of similarities between Sumerian and Turkish http://www.storm.ca/~cm-tntr/sumerturka.html

([ User talk:cengiz_ergun1987|]) 16:21, 2 March 2010 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cengiz ergun1987 (talk • contribs)

No. There is no evidence that is accepted by the community of historical linguists. Dr. Muazzez hasn't proven anything. (Taivo (talk) 01:05, 11 March 2010 (UTC))

Hahaha Muazzez İlmiye Çığ is not Prof. Dr. She has not even a doctorate degree. ----78.191.15.49 (talk) 20:24, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

This is Prof. Dr. Osman Nedim Tuna's work: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0308&L=language&P=2828626&E=2&B=--------------050000000408020202070501&N=Sumerian-Tuna.pdf&T=application%2Fpdf --78.191.47.19 (talk) 11:16, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

And that is considered here as FRINGE. Think for a moment ... how could a very isolated group of people on the edge of the Indian Ocean circa 4500-1100 BCE possibly affect the language of a very small group of people thousands of miles away who were in the proto-stages of their own language development, when there was no contact between them nor any commercial trade between Mesopotamia and the Altai mountains? Sumerian was virtually dead as the Turks were becoming a nation, and certainly had disappeared by the time they expanded anywhere near Sumer/Akkad/Babylonia. Sumerian is a language isolate - this is beyond dispute in academic circles. HammerFilmFan (talk) 03:02, 4 July 2011 (UTC) HammerFilmFan

Classic.. did you read any of the turkish or sumerian history ,no. did you study any akkadian or summerian or turkish ?no. since you dont (want to)know let me tell you.turks are the people who left the mesopotamia and went to central asia. sumerian kings call themslves Turiki, these people left their home lands and went to centralasia . in central asia they were dividen in many diffent groups and later came back to middle east again. even in old jewish text they talk about turks .holy jewish book(s) are based on sumerian history . hope you a nice day — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.173.30.210 (talk) 05:42, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Your support for these fringe-theories - commonly known as 'crazy talk' - notwithstanding, the academic community stands firm in the conclusion that Sumerian is/was a language isolate, and as such, there is zero/zip/nada/the-null-set/no relationship whatsoever with Turkic. HammerFilmFan (talk) 02:33, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Turkic is an iranian-turkic creole language and oghuz turkic is an iranized turkico-iranian.

Turkic is an iranian-turkic creole language and oghuz turkic is an iranized turkico-iranian.

In the site nostratica.ru

http://www.nostratic.ru/books/(250)Clauson_against.pdf

http://www.nostratic.ru/books/(206)Greenberg%20-%20Altaic%20Exists.pdf

http://www.nostratic.ru/books/(203)Nostratic%20and%20altaic.pdf

http://www.nostratic.ru/books/(251)Vovin%20Controversy.pdf

they give iranian etymologies to turkic numbers. gi=>eki tse=>uthse tshorts=>tört pandj=>bish atshish=>alti and so on

Non oghuz turkic languages have rather an irano-altaic conjugation endings. kor-gen-men=see-past suffixe-first person(likely borrowed from iranic)ending.

But in oghuz turkic it became gor-d-um=see-iranian past suffixe d-iranian first person ending.

if you look to these maps below,you could easily see that central asia was inhabitated by iranian speaking populations(saka,chorasmians,dahae,margians,bactrians,soghds..)and of course these tribes did not disappear but merged with turkic newcomers as proven by genetic tests and also by the presence of a caucasoid phenotype and caucasoid phenotype influences amongst central asian turks.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/East-Hem_323bc.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/East-Hem_200bc.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/East-Hem_600ad.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/East-Hem_700ad.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/East-Hem_800ad.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/East-Hem_900ad.jpg

john L.Drake —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.188.81.84 (talk) 17:23, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

NO, YOU'RE WRONG ABOUT NON-OGHUZ TURKIC DIALECTS. In non-Oghuz Turkic, The word "körgenmen" means "I have seen" NOT "I saw". Modern Oghuz dialects have no Present Perfect Tense but old Oghuz had; the word "göryenben" means "I have seen" in old Anatolian Turkish. If you want to say "I saw" in non-Oghuz Turkic, you must say "kördüm" instead of "körgenmen".

Some Examples;

NON-OGHUZ TURKIC => ENGLISH => OGHUZ TURKIC

kel-gen-men => i've come => gel-yen-min (Old Oghuz)
yığla-gan-sın => you've cried => ağla-yan-sın (O.O.)
tut-gan => he/she/it has held => tut-yan (O.O.)
bas-gan-mız => we've stepped/pressed => bas-yan-ız (O.O.)
tab-gan-sız => you(plural) have found => tap-yan-sız (O.O.)
ket-gen-der => they've gone = git-yen-ler (O.O.)
.................................................................
tüshün-dü-m => i understood = düshün-dü-m
söyle-di-n => you said => söyle-di-n
bashta-dı => he/she/it began = bashla-dı
böl-dü-k => we divided => böl-dü-k
al-dı-nız => you(plural)took/get => al-dı-nız
ur-du-lar => they struck/hitted => ur-du-lar —Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.10.134.118 (talk) 17:49, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Turkish has many common words with Sumerian which is the oldest understable written language in the world. This includes the numbers, too. So how can these people say Turkic language is an iranian-turkic creole language or perhaps many Old Turkic words have an indo-european root? (My English is not so good, I am sorry if i have mistakes.) --85.102.107.134 (talk) 22:42, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

The above is absolute rubbish - which has been pointed out many times - Sumerians and Turks never met - they were separated by both time and distance - Sumerian is a language isolate with no known relationships (originally) to any other known language. Claims that Turkish and/or Hungarian (Magyar) are related to Sumerian are absolute lunatic-fringe crap speculation by amateurs.

Caption

The caption "Number of speakers" has no numbers other than percentages. I think the word "number" is not correct here... --E4024 (talk) 12:54, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Ğ is a consonant!

Ğ is neither lenghtens a vocal nor pronunciated as Y, it's a unique consonant. Dağ and "daa" are pronunciated differently. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.155.11.75 (talk) 21:47, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Strongly agree. The expression in the articel is misleading. "Ğ" is a unique sound. It is a consonant and has nothing to do with lenghtening previous sounds. Compare the words below (The words on the right doesn't have a meaning):

• Ağa <> Aaa <> Aya (Elder brother, Aaa means nothing, Aya means "to the Moon")
• Sağ <> Saa <> (Right [direction], Saa means nothing, Say means "count")
• Bağ <> Baa <> Bay (Vinyard, Baa means nothing, Bay means "rich")
• Dağ <> Daa <> Day (Mountain, "Daa" and "Day" mean nothing)
• Ağaç <> Aaaç <> Ayaç (Tree, "Aaç!": Someone is shouting "Oopen!", "Ayaç" means nothing. Compare with "Aç" which means "Open")
• Oğuz <> Oouz <> Oyuz (A Turkish name. "Oouz" is Nonsensical!, "Oyuz" means "we are votes" :)

I can give more examples. Compare following:

• Ah! (Ouch!)
• Aaah! (A lengthened version of Ah!)
• Ağah! (Doesn't hava a meaning. If you say this (ağah!), noone will understand you are in pain!!!)

Therefore, the expression which states that "it is not a consonant" should be removed.--98.196.232.128 (talk) 04:10, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

And now with IPA... - Francis Tyers · 17:39, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Agree totally with the IP user. (Took the liberty to correct a typo that was confusing in the above explanation.) --E4024 (talk) 12:59, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Arabic Grammars of Turkic: The Arabic Linguistic Model Applied to Foreign Languages & Translation of ʼAbū Ḥayyān Al-ʼAndalusī's Kitāb Al-ʼidrāk Li-lisān Al-ʼAtrāk By Robert J. Ermers

http://books.google.com/books?id=6PVS2WpIi-MC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Rajmaan (talk) 18:49, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

Languages or Dialects?

Are the various languages really mutually unintelligible languages? Or are they closer to being dialects? My friend from Turkey says that he can understand 70% to 80% of everything that is spoken in Uyghur (which is even outside the Southwestern branch!). Are these "languages" classified as languages because of geography and they have established a grammar/vocabulary standard within their region? Sour pickle 23:20, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for my bad English. Firstly, I must say that i'm a Turkologist and a native speaker of Kazakh but i've nothing to do with Pan-Turkism or Turanism. Wikipedia's classification about Turkic "languages" is partly based on geographical closeness rather than genealogical(genetical) closeness so it has some wrong informations. For example Yakut language mustn't be cathagorized together with other Siberian Turkic "languages" in the same group called "Siberian Turkic" because it's not genealogically close to them. For talking about genealogical relationships, i should use these terms: language > sublanguage > dialect > subdialect. For example German, English, Italian, French, Mandarin, Cantonese are a language; Portuguese, Spanish, Galician, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish are a sublanguage and Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Iranian, Tajik, Bulgarian, Macedonian are a dialect and British English, American English, Spaniard Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Austrian German, Germanian German, Istanbul Turkish, Balkan Turkish, Aegean Turkish, Cypriot Turkish, North Kyrgyz, South Kyrgyz are a subdialect. There are three separate Turkic LANGUAGEs (with no mutual intelligibility): Türük, Yakut(Sakha), Chuvash. Türük LANGUAGE has five separate sublanguages (they're more or less mutually intelligible to eachother): Qypchaq, Oghuz, Qarluq, Sabir, Khalaj(Arghu). Each sublanguage has its own dialects with high degree of mutual intelligibility. Turkmen, Qashqai, Azerbaijani, Turkish, Gagauz are DIALECTs of Oghuz sublanguage; Kazakh, Nogay, Qarakalpaq, Volga Tatar, Bashqort, Karachay, Kumyk, Karaim are DIALECTs of Qypchaq sublanguage; Uyghur, Lop, Uzbek, Ili Turki are DIALECTs of Qarluq sublanguage and Altaian, Shor, Khakass, Füyü Gyrgys, Tuvan, Chulym are DIALECTs of Sabir sublanguage of Türük LANGUAGE. Crimean Tatar dialect is a mixture of Oghuz and Qypchaq; Kyrgyz dialect is a mixture of Qypchaq and Sabir; Salar dialect is a mixture of Oghuz and Qarluq. According to my knowledge on Turkish and Azerbaijani dialects of Oghuz, both of them have been influenced by Qarluq and some Qypchaq due to mixing with Uzbeks and Tatars between the 14th-18th centuries. So, a Turkish person like your friend or an Azerbaijani person can understand Uyghur more than a Turkmen person can. Because of many mixings between various Türük peoples, Türük languge has a perfect dialect contuniuum.

I bet he can't understand Chuvash or Yakut! You could also make the same claim about the Romance or Slavic languages.

Several have local or national standards. There is a Turkic identity, as there is a Slavic and Latin identity, but I have not been able to determine to what extent Turkic people think they speak dialects of the same language. There are certainly strong nationalistic identities for languages like Uzbek, for example. kwami 23:56, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

As for what constitutes a language or dialect, it's all based on what the speakers feel. Many speakers of Turkish feel that the Turkic languages are all dialects (and so call them in Turkish), but, e.g., Kazakhs do not consider themselves "Kazakh Turks". So yes, it basically comes down to different groups with different histories, regions, standards, etc. Mutual intelligibility between Turkic languages is high, but when you begin to make linguistic generalisations about one, many of those generalisations are going to be wildly different for another. —Firespeaker 02:45, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Quick question which may seem odd - do the languages of central asia form a dialect continuum? - FrancisTyers 11:17, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it is right to refer to other Turkic languages as dialects of the same language. Each of them have differing lexical and grammatical components. Modern Turkish, spoken in Turkey has been heavily influenced by Arabic, Persian and French, whereas the Turkic languages further East are purer, dare I say? I read above that a Turkish man claims to be able to understand 70-80% of the Uigher-language when it is being spoken. Firstly, I'd like to say that Turkish people, men in particular, are very quick to boast and exaggerate (in a harmless, funny way albeit). I have a friend of Uigher origin, an educated woman with a PhD, and it took her 5 years to attain full mastery of the modern, Istanbul dialect which is regarded as standard Turkish. Although phonemic and lexical similarities exist among all of the Turkic languages, time has led to the evolution of most of such linguistic components, and these languages have become mutually unintelligable. A Turk on his travels in Turkistan would probably be better off using English as a communicative medium. Oliver. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.32.49.157 (talk) 18:19, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

My mothertongue is Northwestern Dadashic. This is spoken in a part of Erzurum in Eastern Turkey. People say it is a language of the Turkic languages. For example I am coming we say in our language "ben gelirem" In Northern Dadashic they say "ben gelirim" and in Southern Dadashic in sounds more different "ben geliyem". So how to communicate? I am asking myself why does not the Turkish government accept the four hundred and more languages spoken in Turkey which belong to the West western middle western branch of the Oghuz branch of the Turk languages of the Turkic language group and give them different alphabets? Could it be Pan-Turkism? I have been influenced by my mother and my sisters by my father, so communicating in those different languages gets hard sometimes and we have chosen to communicate in German. But Oliver has given me the idea of learning English. I think even and Istanbulian would need several years for a full mastery in Western Istanbulic. Temir. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.110.96.15 (talk) 16:13, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

My impression is that it's rather like Romance - a dialect continuum throughout most of the area, but with outliers and other notable exceptions, such as Chuvash, maybe Yakut, and several of the highly Persianized lects in Iran. But for most of Central Asia, I believe so. (Don't take my word for it though.) kwami 18:33, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Hmm oki, the problem is that: turkish linguistic nomenclature is a little bit different; look for :"Dil" > "Lehçe" > "Şive" > "Ağız" I cannot tell the difference with my poor English. Lehce is between language and dialect; Turks call Azerbaijani as "lehçe of Turkish". What you call as language is "Dil"; dialect is "Şive" and no translation for Lehçe... I hope u got anything :) Sorry 4 engl --- DunnoEng

Dil = language, Lehçe = dialect, Şive = accent, Ağız = dialect, local variety. The Turkish method of classifying languages is highly politically motivated and is based on Pan-Turkic sentiments and the mistaken belief that the Turkic languages are mutually intelligible. Yet this same system classifies extraordinarily similar languages such as Danish and Norwegian as separate languages. That being said, there are dialect continua between most neighboring languages. The Turkish spoken by a speaker in northeast Turkey likely has many similarities with Azerbaijani, yet a Turkish speaker from Istanbul would probably have a hard time understanding much of what was spoken in Bakı. I say that the best policy here is to give each recognized speech variety its own page and note, where appropriate, any dialectological considerations. Straughn

This not political and not about Panturkism. Look ottoman time. There was nothing called "Panturkism" that time. But people anyway called them as Lehce. Nomenclature may be different but lehce is that what normal turkish speaking people understand.When we told Ukrainian we say "like a 'Lehce' of Russian". Then we are "Panslavist"? Azerbaijan changed their constitutions from "The formal lanbguage of Azerbai.. is Turkish (Türkçe)" to "The form...... is Azerbaijani" it was 10 years ago. The main problem is that, all this languages called Türkçe from the beginning (Look Orkhon script (what translated as Turkic is "Türkçe" or "Türk" not "Türki (means Turkic)"), but all use their branch's name. We chose to say only Turkish. Than they were like "what, why we use their language?". Of course they are different languages, but when u see the "Lehce/dialect" using, dont find it strange. Sorry again wanted to tell (if I could) what I know. --- DunnoEng

Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Uighur, Kazakh, and Kirghiz are surely the same language. Chuvash, Yakut / Sakha, Shor, Altai etc. can be considered different languages. Until the beginning of the 19th century, all Turkic peoples had only two literary languages: Ottoman Turkish and Chagatai Turkish. Chagatai Turkish was known as Türkiy til (Turkic language) and it was not very different from Ottoman Turkish. After the foundation of the Soviet Union, Turkic tribes began to have different literary languages based on their local dialects and they began to be called Azeri nation, Turkmen nation, Kazakh nation and so on. --78.191.25.17 (talk) 17:19, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Having had the same literary language has nothing to do with the question whether varieties are different languages or not. The only valid scientific criterion is mutual intelligibility. Also, it is often the case that speakers of related languages can recognize many words in the other language. This, however, is still far from sufficient for mutual intelligibility. --JorisvS (talk) 13:48, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Can you find any book that use the term 'Turkic languages' pressed before 1918? And have you ever thought why the name of Clauson's book was An Etymological Dictioııary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish? ----78.191.44.80 (talk) 19:24, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Before the 13th century, the Turkic languages were probably still a complex dialect continuum or just two or three distinct languages with complex dialect maps. But languages and dialects are continually changing and today's Turkic languages are languages rather than dialects. Things never stay the same for eight centuries. Trying understanding someone speaking 12th century English. You can't. Languages change and dialects grow apart and into separate languages. (Taivo (talk) 19:43, 21 April 2010 (UTC))

Then why he didn't use the 'Turkic language' term? --78.191.40.58 (talk) 11:58, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

The only reason changed the terminology was Soviet Union's language politics. Europeans and American linguists lately began to use 'Turkic languages' term after that time. Perhaps during last 50 years this term is used in the western countries. ----78.191.20.18 (talk) 20:05, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

No, you are wrong. Soviet policy did not dictate linguistic terminology. (Taivo (talk) 20:47, 21 April 2010 (UTC))

Are you sure? Then why did they change the common Turkish alphabet and make new alphabets for each Turkic tribe? ----78.191.19.56 (talk) 21:58, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't think you know what a linguist is or what linguistics is. New alphabets are not relevant for the discussion of dialect or language. (Taivo (talk) 22:47, 21 April 2010 (UTC))

We are talking about language politics, Mr. linguist. Soviet Union made different alphabets because they wanted Turkish dialects to be seemed as different languages. Then they began to force Turkic people to use Russian language. They killed many Turkic people (mostly the authors and poets) who reject this situation. ----78.191.20.148 (talk) 04:19, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

See this: http://fakulteler.atauni.edu.tr/turkiyat/dergi_icerik.php?dty=943 I can send you more documents like this ----78.191.27.68 (talk) 04:24, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Once again, the Soviets and their alphabet work has NOTHING to do with whether or not linguists (you obviously don't know what a linguist is or does) consider these to be separate languages or dialects of a single language. Linguists recognize their close relationship, but they consider them to be separate languages for a variety of reasons. You can read the essays in Johanson & Csato's volume The Turkic Languages. Your comments are not linguistic in nature, so I'm not going to respond to your anti-linguist harangues anymore. Learn the subject before commenting next time. (Taivo (talk) 04:52, 22 April 2010 (UTC))

If you made a different alphabet for any city dialect (or Mundart) and force the people to use another language like Russian, you can make a new artificial language. Some linguists who didn't taken any education on this language may think that both of these are different languages. Please just show me some resources to prove that Turkic languages term used before 1950's in Western countries. --78.191.40.58 (talk) 11:58, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

If these new "artificial" (spoken!; having different alphabets does not matter) languages are not mutually intelligible, then that's precisely what they've become: different languages. How these different languages came to be is totally irrelevant for answering whether they are languages or dialects. Whether one says 'Turkic languages', or 'Turkish languages' or uses some totally different term is also irrelevant for this question. --JorisvS (talk) 12:38, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I can not understand the medical articles in my own language. Then they are written in another language. --78.191.51.107 (talk) 13:16, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

In an way... But the crucial difference between different languages and jargon of the same language would be that jargon constitutes words for novel concepts, concepts the general populace is probably unfamiliar with. It typically does not substitute words for concepts well-known to the general populace, something common between different languages. --JorisvS (talk) 18:52, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

These are your personal ideas. I don't know if you are a real linguist, too. I couldn't see your real name on your profile. Have you ever taken any Turkology education? Which Turkic languages (to me Turkic dialects) do you know? I don't mean "you speak" because I know many linguists know only some grammar points on many languages, but they can not speak them. You will not respond to me, because you are not able to answer anything. You blame people instead. ----78.191.22.230 (talk) 05:24, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Nothing personal about my ideas. It's the nearly universal position of linguists working on these languages and on historical linguistics in general that the Turkic language family comprises a number of distinct languages. There is, as with the Romance and Slavic languages (which have about the same time depth as much of Turkic) a close degree of similarity between them, but enough difference to call them separate languages. Pseudolinguists like yourself see a few similarities and think that they are the same language because it suits your political agenda. But real linguists know that you will always find similarities between closely related languages, but that doesn't make them similar enough to classify as the same language. It's clear from your comments that you aren't interested in linguistic facts, but only in pushing a pan-Turkish political agenda. This article doesn't bow to nationalistic propaganda. (Taivo (talk) 06:14, 22 April 2010 (UTC))

Since when have Western linguists been using this term? Can you show me some examples before 1950's about 'Turkic languages'? What happend in the last 50-60 years and they began to be called as languages? And please answer my question above: Have you ever taken any Turkology study? Which Turkic dialects do you know? To me, Viennese German seems very different from German. But I can not say that it is a different language. Because I have only limited education on German. You can not comment on the things that you don't know. The difference between Turkic languages is artificial. If a Turkish person learns a few hundreds of words not more than 1000 -many of them borrowed from Russian or another language-, he or she can clearly understand any novel or news in another Turkic dialect. Of course, I do not mean the dialects such as Yakut, Chuvash and some local dialects. They can be considered different languages. This thing is possible for Azerbaijan, Turkmen, Uzbek, Tatar, Uyghur and Kirghiz. To understand Kazakh, you also learn some consonant changes, too. By learning a few hundreds word, the only thing you may not understand some scientific articles. I can not understand some scientific article in my own dialect, too -only specialists can understand them. Grammatical differences are not a big problem. There are many differences in Anatolia, too. Turkish "geliyorum", Azerbaijani "gəlirəm", Uzbek "kelyapman", Turkmen "gelyärin" are sounding nearly the same. ----78.191.24.209 (talk) 07:30, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Let's take a look at the difference between Romance languages and Turkic dialects with some examples.
English: I have a daughter.

Turkic dialects:
Turkish: Benim kızım var. (with CTA: Bänim qızım var.)
Azerbaijani: Mənim qızım var (with CTA: Mänim qızım var.)
Turkmen: Meniñ gyzym bar (with CTA: Meniñ gızım bar.)
Kazakh: Meniñ qızım bar (with CTA: Meniñ qızım bar.)
Kirghiz: Menin kızım bar (with CTA: Menin qızım bar.)
Uzbek: Mening qizim bor (with CTA: Meniñ qızim bår.)
Uyghur: Méning qizim bar (with CTA: Meniñ qızim bar.)
CTA: Common Turkish Alphabet

Romance languages:
French: J'ai une fille.
Italian: (Io) ho una figlia.
Spanish: (Yo) tengo una hija.
Portuguese: Eu tenho uma filha.
English: I have daughters.

Turkic dialects:
Turkish: Benim kızlarım var. (with CTA: Bänim qızlarım var.)
Azerbaijani: Mənim qızlarım var (with CTA: Mänim qızlarım var.)
Turkmen: Meniñ gyzlarym bar (with CTA: Meniñ gızlarım bar.)
Kazakh: Meniñ qızdarım bar (with CTA: Meniñ qızdarım bar.)
Kirghiz: Menin kızdarım bar (with CTA: Menin qızdarım bar.)
Uzbek: Mening qizlarim bor (with CTA: Meniñ qızlärim bår.)
Uyghur: Méning qizlirim bar (with CTA: Meniñ qızlirim bar.)
CTA: Common Turkish Alphabet

Romance languages:
French: J'ai filles.
Italian: (Io) ho figlie.
Spanish: (Yo) tengo hijas.
Portuguese: Eu tenho filhas.

If you want I can send you more examples. ----78.191.30.163 (talk) 10:10, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

You've just done a very good job of describing why these are different languages and not just dialects of a single language. Thank you. To understand a dialect, you don't need to learn sound changes and a few hundred words. You just need to listen and you understand. Any Russian speaker can learn some sound changes and a few hundred words and be able to understand basic Polish or Croatian. (Taivo (talk) 01:39, 23 April 2010 (UTC))

Then according to you Viennese German is diferent language from Standard German. Perhaps American English is a different language from British English, too. There are many Spanish languages in Latin America. ----78.191.62.47 (talk) 06:37, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

American and British English can be readily understood by speakers of the other. The case of Viennese German depends on what you're talking about exactly: If it's Austrian Standard German, as also spoken in Vienna, then no, it isn't. But if you're talking about the original Viennese, then YES, that is a different language from Standard German. It is a dialect of Austro-Bavarian. The same also holds for several varieties in the southwest (Switzerland and bordering German regions): These are distinct, Alemannic, languages. --JorisvS (talk) 09:06, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

American English and British English can be readily understood by speakers of the other. Because the words of both are put in the same dictionaries and people learn them together. Many Spanish dictionaries contain Latin American words, too. If we add a few hundreds of words to our dictionaries and people learn them together, it could be the same thing. The dictionaries with parentheses (BrE, AmE) and (AzTr, KzTr, UzTr) would not be so different. ----78.191.40.58 (talk) 11:13, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Whether or not words can be found in the same dictionary is totally irrelevant: I could create an English+Dutch+German-French dictionary (in which speakers of French could look up English, Dutch, and German words), but this wouldn't make English, Dutch, and German the same language. Moreover: speakers do NOT learn their languages from dictionaries; speakers learn their language from their social environment, in which certain words are or are not used.
And if you propose having people from the various Turkic languages learn and use certain words so that they can (learn to !) understand eachother, then you're proposing creating language convergence and are confirming what Taivo already said: they are, at the present time, (related) languages (="mutually unintelligible varieties"). Language convergence can, in principle, make different languages change to become dialects; that does not make them dialects to begin with. --JorisvS (talk) 11:41, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

English, Dutch, German and French are not available for this job alltogether. But American English and British English are available. If you separate their dictionaries and prevent people to travel from Britain to USA or from USA to Britain, and ban many things such as going abroad in one of this country, then force people to use another language for scientific activities etc., the same thing happened to Turkic dialects can happen to them. --78.191.40.58 (talk) 12:06, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Please explain what you mean they're not available for this job...One certainly CAN make such a dictionary.
If I were to separate these two English language communities (dictionaries are pretty irrelevant here: dictionaries do not define a language, they merely describe its vocabulary) and induce sufficient language change, then they will have BECOME different languages, which says nothing about whether they are now. This is called language divergence, the opposite of language convergence. Language divergence has happened countless times in the history of the Earth: Hindi and English were once the same language, when Proto-Indo-European was spoken, but diverged. (And, clearly, it's ridiculous to claim they're the same language now.)
Saying that such language divergence happened (for different reasons but I get the point) to the Turkic languages equals simply saying that the languages are related (which no one denies). --JorisvS (talk) 12:38, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Let's assume they are separate languages, then why did Western linguists begin to use this term after 1950s? Did the criteria change or what happened? The thing you wrote about English and Hindi is not the same thing with Turkish and Azerbaijani or other dialects. English is very different from even old English. But Turkish and other Turkic dialects still have been using the same suffixes from the oldest known inscriptions and they are common even now. --78.191.51.107 (talk) 13:02, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

What's with your insistence on the use of some terms? And if in the (quite distant) past people had different terms, then there is a simple and good explanation: new insights! To illustrate my point the analogy I drew with English and Hindi was, of course, exaggerated, but do you get the point? (as that's the whole point of analogies). Again, the criterion for languages is mutual unintelligibility (I've said that quite a few times now), not whether many similarities exist or whether the varieties in question have lost or kept the protolanguage's case system. --JorisvS (talk) 17:51, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

If you give an importance to the different insights, TDK (Türk Dil Kurumu), the official foundation which is arranging and researching our language in Turkey, has been using 'Türk Lehçeleri' (Turkic dialects) term. There is an external link on Turkic languages article "Turkic language vocabulary comparison tool / dictionary". Its original name is "Karşılaştırmalı Türk Lehçeleri Sözlüğü", not "Türk Dilleri Sözlüğü". There are "Çağdaş Türk Lehçeleri ve Edebiyatları" departments at some universities in Turkey, too. Can you add some informations about these to the article? You may not support this insight, but it is still there. --78.191.30.63 (talk) 05:48, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Interesting to note (including in the article), if I understand what you're saying (since there is a lot of Turkish in it...). However, whether some organization calls some varieties dialects does not in fact answer the question. There may be political motivations involved (e.g. Pan-Turkism in this case). Many regional languages, for example Neapolitan in Italy or some Oïl languages of France, have often long been officially 'degraded' to the status of dialects for similar reasons (e.g. quelling independence movements). Instead, try answering the following question: How well would speakers of the various Turkic languages fare in a coordination game in which speakers of the same language fare well (and in which, to eliminate noise, non-verbal communication is made impossible). --JorisvS (talk) 19:32, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

This is not related with Pan-Turkism. Perhaps Turkish linguists didn't change their insight after 1950's but Western linguists did. --78.191.24.37 (talk) 08:41, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Do you really think that an example illustrating no more than three root words, and then another example illustrating the same three words, is a convincing exposition? Following your approach, I can 'prove' that English and Afrikaans are the same language by citing the sentence "My pen is in my hand", which is written exactly the same way and means exactly the same thing in those two languages. Regarding your feeling about the significance of the writing systems: Turkish was still Turkish after the (non-Soviet-imposed) switch to the Roman-based alphabet from the Arabic one, correct? —Largo Plazo (talk) 14:58, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

New alphabets are based on the old Cyrillic ones. During the Soviet Union, the Turkmen Cyrilic Alphabet had one letter for "k" and "q", now Turkmen Latin alphabet has one letter for these two consonants again. Uzbeks Cyrilic alphabet had one letter for "a" and "ä", now Uzbek Latin alphabet has one letter again for these two vowels again, etc. The Soviet Union collapsed but the governors of these countries remained generally from Soviet era. And the things which were imposed on people along more than 80 years are not being able to change so easily. ----78.191.55.231 (talk) 17:42, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Does this have anything to do with the above discussion? --JorisvS (talk) 17:51, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Ask Largo --78.191.51.240 (talk) 18:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

No, I'm asking you: what is your reason for bringing this to the discussion? --JorisvS (talk) 19:32, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

As German is a pluricentric language, Austrian German is another standard variety in addition to the German spoken in Germany. Much like the relationship between American and British English, Austrian German is simply another standard form of the German language. The "Österreichisches Wörterbuch" states specific grammar rules and is a dictionary using Austrian spelling. In addition to this standard variety, in everyday life most Austrians speak one of a number of High German dialects.
With German being a pluricentric language, Austrian dialects should not be confused with the variety of Standard German spoken by most Austrians, which is distinct from that of Germany or Switzerland. Distinctions in vocabulary persist, for example, in culinary terms, where communication with Germans is frequently difficult, and administrative and legal language, which is due to Austria's exclusion from the development of a German nation-state in the late 19th century and its manifold particular traditions. A comprehensive collection of Austrian-German legal, administrative and economic terms is offered in: Markhardt, Heidemarie: Wörterbuch der österreichischen Rechts-, Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsterminologie (Peter Lang, 2006).
Beside the official Austrian German, Austrian dialects from various regions are occasionally seen in written form, containing a large number of contractions and abbreviations compared to standard German, which can be hard to understand for non-native speakers (although the same applies to German dialects in Germany and Switzerland).
(quotation from Austrian_German).
If Austrian German is still another Standard German (not another language), then Turkic dialects are other Standard Turkishes. --78.191.59.78 (talk) 04:30, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Austrian German is just German, like American and British English are both English. But: As you say, there are many local "dialects" in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria alike of which it is very hard for non-natives to understand anything coherent: that's why they are actually different languages (Austro-Bavarian in Austria, Alemannic (plural) in Switzerland and southwestern Germany, etc.), distinct from both either form of Standard German and eachother. These local varieties I was considering here. --JorisvS (talk) 19:32, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

And this is one thing more than "My pen is in my hand":

Ayrılıq

Ayrılık

Bu gün, yenə hər sabah olduğu kimi, Oyanmaq istədim öpüşünlə. Amma, yoxsan. Ah çəkib yandım, həsrətinlə. Bu gün, dərdə çarə olan dərman kimi, Aldım rəsmini əlimə. Baxdım, baxdım. Ah çəkib yandım, sənsizliyimə. Hanı o bir cüt bəla dediyim qara gözlərin, Könlümü oxşayan şirin-şirin gülüşlərin. Hanı, o əllərimi tutan əllərin, Mənə ümid verən o xoş sözlərin. Ayrılıq, yenə dərdli başıma gəlib tac oldu, Ayrılıq, səni məndən alıb, gözümü yaşlı qoydu. Ayrılıq, yenə dərdli başıma gəlib tac oldu, Ayrılıq, səni məndən alıb ümidsiz qoydu. Anladım, artıq geri dönməyəcəksən. Amma, bir tək təsəlli var. Səndən mənə, Yadigar qalan xatirələr var. Hanı o bir cüt bəla dediyim qara gözlərin, Könlümü oxşayan şirin-şirin gülüşlərin. Hanı, o əllərimi tutan əllərin, Mənə ümid verən o xoş sözlərin. Ayrılıq, yenə dərdli başıma gəlib tac oldu, Ayrılıq, səni məndən alıb, gözümü yaşlı qoydu. Ayrılıq, yenə dərdli başıma gəlib tac oldu, Ayrılıq, səni məndən alıb ümidsiz qoydu.

Bugün, yine her sabah olduğu gibi, Uyanmak istedim öpüşünle. Ama, yoksun. Ah çekip yandım, hasretinle. Bugün, derde çare olan derman gibi, Aldım resmini elime. Baktım, baktım. Ah çekip yandım, sensizliğime. Hani o bir çift bela dediğim kara gözlerin, Gönlümü okşayan şirin şirin gülüşlerin. Hani, o ellerimi tutan ellerin, Bana ümit veren o hoş sözlerin. Ayrılık, yine dertli başıma gelip taç oldu, Ayrılık, seni benden alıp, gözümü yaşlı koydu. Ayrılık, yine dertli başıma gelip taç oldu, Ayrılık, seni benden alıp ümitsiz koydu. Anladım, artık geri dönmeyeceksin. Ama, bir tek teselli var. Senden bana, Yadigar kalan hatıralar var. Hani o bir çift bela dediğim kara gözlerin, Gönlümü okşayan şirin şirin gülüşlerin. Hani, o ellerimi tutan ellerin, Bana ümit veren o hoş sözlerin. Ayrılık, yine dertli başıma gelip taç oldu, Ayrılık, seni benden alıp, gözümü yaşlı koydu. Ayrılık, yine dertli başıma gelip taç oldu, Ayrılık, seni benden alıp ümitsiz koydu.

---

78.191.55.231 (talk) 17:45, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

This is Turkish:
Sedasının ahengi samimi bir teessürle veznin ağır cereyanı üzerinden mariz bir seyelan ile akıyor, kelimeler uzun bir matem nâlesi tarzında hafif ivicaçlarla uzanıp gidiyordu.

This is Turkish, too:
Sesinin ahengi içten bir üzüntüyle ölçünün ağır akışı üzerinden hastalıklı bir akıntı ile akıyor, kelimeler uzun bir matem iniltisi tarzında hafif eğrilişlerle uzanıp gidiyordu.

To understand the texts like the first one, you learn a few hundreds (perhaps more than thousand) of words. But it is still Turkish. If you learn these words you can understand some Turkic dialects like Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Uyghur, Kazakh, Kirghiz and so on more easily.

What's more, there are thousands of Turkish words, which literally aren't used, in the city dialects. These words are generally common in Anatolia, but they are not included in the literary language. Because our literary language was based on the Istanbul dialect (or colloquial language in Istanbul) first. I can see these words in other Turkic dialects. For example in Karadeniz (Black Sea) region of Turkey, the people use the word "uşak" (with CTA: uşaq). Same word is used in Azerbaijan with the same meaning literally. My friend from Amasya is using the word "eme" for "aunt". Same word is used in Uzbekistan for the same meaning. ----78.191.62.47 (talk) 07:07, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Don't you think "eme" is an Arabic loan-word (عمة, used at least in Persian for "paternal aunt" and there pronounced "amme")? Wdanbae (talk)

You can find cognates of very many, if not most English words (native words of Germanic origin, not loanwords) somewhere in some German dialect, and vice versa. You will also find many words borrowed from the same French or Latin source. You could therefore use these dialect words that are obscure and highly unusual in the standard language (or have different meanings, or are found only as part of idioms), to "translate" English into German, and vice versa, to impress readers who don't know the language "translated" into, or neither, but the result will be garbled and unrecognisable to native speakers, full of false friends. Your "proof" that English is a mere dialect of German will appear valid only to those who don't know English, but to those who do it will show the opposite of what it is intended to.

It is true that English and German have strongly diverged on the phonetic level, but I'm only using these two languages because they will be highly recognisable to all readers, and because there is no controversy about their being different languages. Examples from Slavic would make the same point better, because these languages too are highly similar on the phonetic level, and they are full of cognates and false friends relative to each other. Using the method to "prove" that all Turkic languages are mere dialects of Turkish, you could "prove" that all Slavic languages are mere dialects of Russian (which conveniently, though an East Slavic language, contains a lot of Church Slavonic, i. e., South Slavic words). Hell, pointing to extreme cases such as Qaumī Tarāna you could "prove" that Urdu (an Indo-Aryan language) is identical with Persian (an Iranian language), using this "method"!

But the fact remains that linguistic divergence happens on many levels, not just the phonetic one, and purely phonetic similarity says nothing, because divergent lexicon will hamper intelligibility much more, and grammar is much more central to the identity of a language than either pronunciation or lexicon.

Considering the fact that Turkish is in a sense less lexically "pure" than Central Asian Turkic, and spoken much farther from the original homeland (in Mongolia or thereabouts), the attempt to argue that these languages are all mere dialects of Turkish is indeed amusingly arbitrary; the argument that Turkish is a Persianised dialect of Kazakh, Turkmen, Uzbek or whatever would make slightly more sense, though it would still be misguided and plain wrong.

I'd also like to point out that in light of how Turkic languages have constantly kept influencing each other, current similarities say little about the origins, the historical descendance of the individual languages, classification of Turkic languages being therefore a notoriously difficult field and needing to take data about older stages of the languages in account.

A final point about terminology: Yes, originally the whole family was called Turkish, just as the whole family English belongs to was once called German, but since "Turkish" also refers specifically to the language spoken in Anatolia, awkward as this may be, the very insight by linguists that related languages can be quite different, and cannot be subsumed under the same label, led to the creation of the term "Turkic", as an analogous insight led to the creation of the term "Germanic", as in countless other cases where it was realised that a term for a higher-level group was needed after the discovery or identification of related but separate idioms. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 05:35, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

What happened to the Kurds?

One can always test the impartiality of an article on Turks, Turkey, Turkic languages, etc., by noting whether or not the Kurds---an Indo-European/Iranic people, speaking Indo-European languages, are included or excluded from the numbers and the MAPS showing the Turkic people. In this article, the Turkic speaking people are plotted (with some exaggeration) over the map of the countries where they live. However, for Turkey, it is painted wall-to-wall with Turkish! Sooooo what happened to the a quarter of the population of that country that just happen to be Kurds, and NOT speak Turkish as their native tongue?? Pan-Turkism is fine as long as it does not become unfair to others nor propagate misinformation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.244.22.233 (talk) 18:18, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

__ Ummm, sorry but you are making a mistake by being emotional(that is my most naive approach for an adj. there) but the map simply shows the regions with Turkish speaking people, that doesn't mean the colored areas are arid of all other languages.

But if you had looked at the map objectively, you would say that as a general case, not just for Kurdish, and I would give you the same answer. Sadly your point of wiev here is higly centric. 71.88.103.90 (talk) 15:39, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Map is not correct

One of the map is OR. Gilaki is not Turkish. Neither is the language of Qazvin and a good chunk of Western Azerbaijan where the people speak Kurdish. --alidoostzadeh 03:28, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Again, about the same question as above, is the map on the main page for speakers of Turkic languages as a first language? We should mention that under the map. We can have a map of first language ones, but I think we should also have a map of all Turkic speakers (regions with significantly many Turkic speakers should be marked). The Indo European language wiki site has a map ( [ [ Image:IE_countries.png ] ], remove blanks), where the whole country is marked depending on the official status of an indo european language and whether it is a majority or minority language. That might not work well here. --deniz 06:00, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

So Kurdish the people of South and South-East Turkey's first language is kurd - but maps showing they turk language.???????????????!!!!!!!!!!??--Roohiran (talk) 12:32, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

For anyone coming to this party late - it is not meant to show that in southeastern Turkey the majority of people there speak Turkish as a first-language, just that some primarily Turkish-speaking people live there - don't get wound up in nationalism in a scientific article - you'll just walk away mad.HammerFilmFan (talk) 04:34, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

Universality of Vowel Harmony

The third paragraph in the introduction claims that vowel harmony is a "universal" characteristic in the Turkic language family, but this is not true. Uzbek, one of the larger Turkic languages lacks vowel harmony. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 185.42.96.236 (talk) 03:44, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Number of speakers

Someone changed the population from 100-130M to 200-250M. I revised downward to 140M. This is a quick estimate based on the larger languages listed in Ethnologue. Counting the little languages would push the number over this by a couple million, but it seems likely that the figures for Uzbek are exaggerated, and would more than compensate. (This may be the case for Azeri as well.) Perhaps a figure of 130-145M would be more appropriate, if someone wants to work it out. kwami 01:10, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Is this estimate for the number of people speaking Turkic as the first language or just for the number of people speaking Turkic?

--deniz 06:00, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

i dont agree. Only Turkey and Azerbeidjan together is 110M + 10M Azeri's in Iran gives already approx. 120M. I think 200M would be a more realistic number globally, there we also have a large population of Turkic people in Central Asia

nope, the numbers are wrong, for example around 10 million out of 20 million kurdish from turkey speak Kurdish as their first language. The number could be correct if you calculate it as who speak turkic languages, but they are wrong as first language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.240.60.68 (talk) 20:17, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

Kurdish is not a solid language, it is divided into 3 sections and non of them are intelligible. Another point is that i.e. For an Algerian born in France, his/her first lang. is French or Arabic? (Prusan (talk) 14:21, 6 April 2016 (UTC))

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Proposed Kazakh Orthography with Apostrophes

At some point an update may be necessary, due to the recent, novel (and very problematic) decision by the president of Kazakhstan to extensively use apostrophes as they transition from a Cyrillic back to a Latin script. E.g. “the Kazakh word for cherry will be written as s’i’i’e, and pronounced she-ee-ye” ([4]). What is the current "native Latin" column for Kazakh based on, and what would it look like under the new proposal? ★NealMcB★ (talk) 16:58, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Change the first map?

I believe that the first map, for some nation like Turkemenistan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, doesn't shade the areas where the language is spoke but rather shades the countries where it is a main language. This gives a wrong impression, I have another map from another editor which I propose to replace it with, here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_Wolves_(organization)#/media/File:Turkic_language_map-present_range.png Migboy123 (talk) 04:03, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

I'd strongly support it as it shows the real distribution of Turkic languages, but it fails to show subfamilies within Turkic family like Oghuz, Karluk etc. It also lacks areas where Turkish is still widely spoken as a second language like Kurdistan and parts of Central Asia. I think this map might be better with few modifications? @Migboy123:

Removal of sourced data as OR

@Beshogur: why are you removing data that's cited to sources, calling them OR without further elaboration in your edit summaries? Largoplazo (talk) 19:34, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Well that whole story is an orginal research, those cited texts are taken from the language articles itself, you can check one by one. Except making that chart, there's zero effort. Lot of those text had actually nothing to do with the language itself. Beshogur (talk) 21:36, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Unexplained changes on infobox. Please change this to this. Beshogur (talk) 16:49, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

 Not done: The page's protection level has changed since this request was placed. You should now be able to edit the page yourself. If you still seem to be unable to, please reopen the request with further details. QueerFilmNerd^talk 16:54, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Why is Kurdish areas in Turkey shown as being spoken a Turkic Language.

The spoken tongue of the Kurds in Turkey are Kurmanji and Zaza both of which are Iranian languages not Turkic languages. Vallee01 (talk) 10:43, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

You don't understand the map. It is not representing an area or areas where ONLY Turkic is spoken, but where it IS spoken - and there may be other native-speakers of non-Turkic living side-by-side.50.111.1.232 (talk) 20:38, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Issyk inscription

The Issyk inscription is in Saka, an Iranian language, not in a Turkic language. --Taivo (talk) 16:51, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

- Here is a poem from Sakha people

" Alpertuynga Öldüğ miğ, Ijjsıyz Ajun Kaldi mi? Irsıyz Öjcün Aldi mi? İmdi ürek yırdıkir. " It means nothing in Persian but modern Turkish translation is like

Alper Tunga Öldü mü

Issız Acun kaldı mı? Hırsız Öcünü aldı mı? Şimdi yürek yırtılır

Saka's are clearly Turkic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.142.92.23 (talk) 18:15, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

NO, they weren't. They spoke an Iranic language and your pan-Turkic nationalist original research means nothing.50.111.1.232 (talk) 20:42, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

IP edit

Dear IP,

you have to provide sources and please gain consensus here. Thank you.(KIENGIR (talk) 04:40, 29 January 2021 (UTC))

Oğuz Turkic in China?

In the map there is a red part in Central China. Which Turkic language is spoken there? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.76.29.65 (talk) 22:18, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Classification

@Isebito: Please do not insist on your changes in an edit-warring fashion, but discuss them here first. While I think that your revision is mostly ok, you should not cite a semi-active website for that purpose, even if it is apparently run by Johanson, by one of the leading subject-matter experts, but rather cite his latest publication about it: "The classification of the Turkic languages", in Martine Robbeets and Alexander Savelyev (eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages, 2020, Oxford University Press, pp. 105–114. @Beshogur: Are you fine with that source for an update?

Additionally, explanatory notes should not be mixed with references. I suggest to use the {{efn}} note template here, and add {{notelist}} at the end of the article. –Austronesier (talk) 18:42, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion. The classification has been based on the website of Lars Johanson since before my revision. I just revised the classification with updates of the website. I agree with the citation of "The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages". Isebito (talk) 14:45, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Unexpected transliteration “Divânü Lügati't-Türk” with “ü”s

I doubt that the spelling ‘’Divânü Lügati't-Türk’’ is correct, since elsewhere (e.g. the Turkish language Wikipedia) I found it spelt as ‘’Dîvânu Lugâti't-Türk’’ and since at least the current Standard Arabic does not have sounds (similar to that) which in the current Turkish orthography are spelt ‘’ü’’, namely a rounded close front vowel. I can understand that in the language name this letter may be retained, but in the words ‘’Dîvânu Lugâti't’’, which apparently represent words in Arabic, I would not (immediately) expect rounded close front vowels. Or did some local variety of Arabic at the time have such vowel? Could someone knowledgeable comment on this?Redav (talk) 10:51, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Comment

How else would you explain the fact that the word 'Altay' has a meaning in Turkish and is a common boy's or a family name. The same goes for Ural! Nearly all Central Asian, Siberian and Mongolian geographical names have a meaning in ancient Turkish. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.69.30.25 (talk • contribs) 16:19, 7 November 2004 (UTC)

I was wondering as to what happened to the "Edit this Page" button?--Moosh88 03:28, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Unexpected transliteration “Divânü Lügati't-Türk” with “ü”s

I doubt that the spelling ‘’Divânü Lügati't-Türk’’ is correct, since elsewhere (e.g. the Turkish language Wikipedia) I found it spelt as ‘’Dîvânu Lugâti't-Türk’’ and since at least the current Standard Arabic does not have sounds (similar to that) which in the current Turkish orthography are spelt ‘’ü’’, namely a rounded close front vowel. I can understand that in the language name this letter may be retained, but in the words ‘’Dîvânu Lugâti't’’, which apparently represent words in Arabic, I would not (immediately) expect rounded close front vowels. Or did some local variety of Arabic at the time have such vowel? Could someone knowledgeable comment on this?Redav (talk) 10:51, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Tatar in Romania

@Yokubjon Juraev and Super Dromaeosaurus: Both of you are encouraged to cease edit warring without discussion on the article talk page. I have opened this discussion as it appears a new article has been written on Tatar in Romania and there's disagreement on whether to include mention of it in this article. Let me know if a third opinion is needed. ~ Pbritti (talk) 19:58, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

I started a discussion on their talk page. It evidently should be excluded as this is a list of languages and "Tatar language in Romania" is not a language. Super Ψ Dro 19:59, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

@Super Dromaeosaurus: You reverted multiple times without explanation and warned Yokubjon Juraev for edit warring when you had hit the 3RR upper limit, not them. Discussions on article content should generally be opened on an article talk page with in-depth explanation. ~ Pbritti (talk) 20:19, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you @Pbritti! Yokubjon Juraev (talk) 20:21, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't agree with that statement. Can this be considered as a first revert of mine [5]? I hadn't ever interacted with this user up until that point and I didn't manually revert the edits of an user either, as can be shown by the lack of such a tag in the history of the page. Is this in the policy? Though it is right I could've taken a more diplomatic approach, I was hoping to be able to end with this as fast as possible. Thank you and Austronesier anyway for the help, as the conflict now appears to be solved. Super Ψ Dro 22:10, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Ok, I will cease editing. I have never come across in any book where Romanian Tatar is called a dialect of Crimean Tatar, so I think it should be considered a language unless proven otherwise. I was a bit disappointed that the entry “Romanian Tatar” was deleted several times by several users. Super D. also unfortunately didn’t explain why he deleted it so I kept on reverting. Another reason for edit warring is because I consider expanding Turkic languages-related articles my niche! :) Yokubjon Juraev (talk) 20:21, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

@Yokubjon Juraev: You're essentially adding unsourced content to a table that is explicitly sourced to Lars Johanson. I think it should be considered a language unless proven otherwise is the wrong approach: the core Wikipedia policy of WP:verifiability requires positive support for a statement to be included here. So the onus is on you to show that it is widely considered anything else but a dialect of Crimean Tatar. But since you ask for a book that does treat Romanian Tatar as a variety of Crimean Tatar, I can recommend Turkic (on page 62), a 2021 volume by Lars Johanson. –Austronesier (talk) 20:50, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Ok, I agree! If you consider it right, you can revert my change. Yokubjon Juraev (talk) 21:00, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

It's not so much a matter of right or wrong (after all, nobody knowingly and willingly adds wrong content here), but rather about collectively building content that is based on reliable sources and consensus among editors. Edit warring (= keeping on reverting) disrupts the calm environment that is necessary for that goal. –Austronesier (talk) 21:15, 4 June 2023 (UTC)

Not even true

Turkish is an Altaic language from Mongolian-Altaic family. It is not its own linguistic category. Determined vandalism had altered linguistic category. Fixed. Claim that Turkish is a native language spoken from Eastern to Southern Europe and in the Balkans. No one speaks Turkish in any of these regions "natively" - very miniscule linguistic minorities exist, it is therefore a micro-minority language. Turkey has a few kms on the Bosphorus in Europe. It is at best a minority language in small parts of East Europe. Historiaantiqua (talk) 00:38, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

What are you suggesting we change?

There already exists an article about the Altaic language family hypothesis, keep in mind that this is a very controversial and widely rejected idea and that people who want to learn about the proposed Altaic family can read about that on its own article.

Another thing, there definitely are native speakers of Turkic languages in Eastern and Southern Europe and the Balkans. Gagauz, Crimean Tatar, and Turkish (East Thrace exists) to name a few. GMFinnegan (talk) 20:58, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

I believe the OP is referring to this change that they made and which has been reverted by Beshogur. The claim seems to be that the arch-Altaicist Martine Robbeets is now the accepted mainstream - by citing a 2021 paper. That seems unlikely but the OP needs to explain their case per WP:DUE rather than basing it on a single Robbeets et al. citation. I'm guessing they are not familiar with WP:DUE. DeCausa (talk) 21:17, 30 November 2023 (UTC)