TürkçeProtoTürkçe

TürkçeProtoTürkçe is a coined term that appears in limited linguistic discussions as a hypothetical bridge between Proto-Turkic and the modern Turkish language. It is not an established historical stage in mainstream Turkic linguistics. The label blends Türkçe, the Turkish language, with Proto-Turkçe (Proto-Turkic) to describe either a theoretical intermediate variety or a pedagogical construct used in demonstrations of language change.

Scholarly use of the term tends to be informal. In some contexts, TürkçeProtoTürkçe is imagined as a proto-variety with Turkish surface features, used as a teaching or thought experiment to explore how sound changes, affixation patterns, and vocabulary might carry over from an ancestor language to Turkish. In other uses, it functions as a linguistic placeholder for discussing reconstruction methods, etymology, or cross-dialect comparisons within Turkic studies.

Because Proto-Turkic is reconstructed and Turkish is a modern member of the Oghuz branch, TürkçeProtoTürkçe does not correspond to a named, independently attested language. Any discussion invoking the term should distinguish between established reconstructions of Proto-Turkic and the actual historical development of Turkish from those ancestors. The term is more accurately described as a heuristic or mnemonic device rather than as a rigorously defined taxonomic category.

See also: Proto-Turkic; Turkish language; historical linguistics; language reconstruction.