protoTurkicspeaking
protoTurkicspeaking refers to the hypothesized linguistic and cultural phase of the populations that spoke Proto-Turkic, the reconstructed ancestor of the Turkic language family. It is not directly attested in surviving texts but is inferred by the comparative method from features shared among modern Turkic languages.
Geography and dating: Proto-Turkic is posited to have been spoken in the Eurasian steppe belt of Central
Linguistic profile: Proto-Turkic is characterized as an agglutinative language with vowel harmony and a predominantly suffixing
Relationship to modern languages: The proto-Turkic-speaking communities gave rise to the Turkic languages, divided into branches
Research notes: As a reconstruction, protoTurkicspeaking is a scholarly construct relying on systematic correspondences among languages,