Turkmen (
Latin script türkmençe, türkmen tili,
Cyrillic ?????????, ??????? ????,
Perso-Arabic ?????? ???? ,????????) is the name of the national language of
Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 3,000,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 380,000 in northwestern
Afghanistan and 500,000 in northeastern
Iran.
[3]Turkmen is in the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family. It is a member of the southwestern Turkic sub-branch, more specifically the East Oghuz group. This group also includes Khorasani Turkic. Turkmen is closely related to Turkish and Azerbaijani, and it is for the most part mutually intelligible.
Turkmen has vowel harmony, is agglutinative, and has no grammatical gender or irregular verbs. Word order is Subject Object Verb.
Written Turkmen today is based on the Teke (Tekke) dialect. Other dialects are Nohurly, Yomud, Änewli, Hasarly, Nerezim, Teke (Tekke), Göklen, Salyr, Saryk, Ärsary and Çowdur. The Teke dialect is sometimes (especially in Afghanistan) referred to as "Chagatai", but like all Turkmen dialects it reflects only a limited influence from classical Chagatai.
