The
Turkic languages constitute a
language family of some thirty languages, spoken by
Turkic peoples across a vast area from
Eastern Europe and the
Mediterranean to
Siberia and Western
China, and are considered to be part of the proposed
Altaic language family.
[1][2]Turkic languages are spoken by some 180 million people as a native language;[3] and the total number of Turkic speakers is over 200 million, including speakers as a second language. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish proper, or Anatolian [and Balkan] Turkish, the speakers of which account for about 40% of all Turkic speakers.[2] Characteristic features of Turkish, such as vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family and the Altaic languages.[2] There is also a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the various Oghuz languages, which include Turkish, Azeri, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz, and Balkan Gagauz Turkish.[4]
The characteristic features of the Turkic languages are vowel harmony, extensive agglutination by means of suffixes, and lack of noun classes or grammatical gender. Subject Object Verb word order is universal within the family. All of these distinguishing characteristics are shared with the Mongolic and Tungusic language families, as well as with the Korean language (with the exception of vowel harmony), which are by some linguists considered to be genetically linked with the Turkic languages in the proposed Altaic language family, a language family rejected by most linguists [5] though accepted in the Voegelin & Voegelin classification (197718-19).[6]
The geographical distribution of Turkic-speaking peoples across Eurasia spreads from Turkey in the West to the North-East of Siberia (see picture in the box on the right above).[7]
