Turkiclanguage

Turkic languages are a language family spoken by Turkic peoples across a wide geographic area that stretches from Eastern Europe and the Caucasus to Central Asia, Siberia, and parts of Western China. The family comprises many languages and numerous dialects, with speaker numbers ranging from tens of millions to well over a hundred million. They form one of the most widely distributed language groups in Eurasia.

Linguistically, Turkic languages are generally agglutinative, relying on extensive suffixation to mark case, number, tense, mood, and possession. They typically exhibit vowel harmony, a strict subject–object–verb (SOV) or verb-final word order, and little to no grammatical gender. Nouns inflect for case, and verbs carry person and tense concord. The lexicon shows varying degrees of borrowing from Persian, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese, reflecting long histories of contact with neighboring cultures.

Historically, Old Turkic is the earliest attested stage, known from the Orkhon inscriptions of the 8th century. The family later diversified into several branches, including Oghuz, Karluk, Kipchak, Siberian Turkic, and Chuvash in some classifications. In the modern era, Turkic languages exist in many official and regional varieties and have adopted a range of writing systems: Latin script is used in several countries, Cyrillic remains common in others, and Arabic scripts persist for some communities. Turkey’s Turkish and Azerbaijan’s Azerbaijani use Latin scripts, while many Central Asian languages have used Cyrillic during the Soviet period and are gradually transitioning to Latin or mixed systems.

Major modern Turkic languages include Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Tuvan, and Yakut, among others. The Turkic language family is defined by shared historical development and characteristic typological features, while individual languages show regional and socio-political variation.