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 Asia and southern Siberia, in a broad region from the Ural area to Mongolia and Xinjiang, during the first millennium BCE and into the early centuries CE.

Linguistic profile: Proto-Turkic is characterized as an agglutinative language with vowel harmony and a predominantly suffixing morphology. Basic syntax commonly follows SOV word order. The phonological inventory is reconstructed to include a series of consonants and vowels that later diverged into the sounds found in descendant Turkic languages. The lexicon includes terms related to pastoralism and steppe life, and comparative evidence shows loanwords from neighboring languages such as Iranian and Chinese, reflecting long-standing contact.

Relationship to modern languages: The proto-Turkic-speaking communities gave rise to the Turkic languages, divided into branches such as Common Turkic (Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tatar, etc.) and the Oghur branch (including Chuvash and related tongues).

Research notes: As a reconstruction, protoTurkicspeaking is a scholarly construct relying on systematic correspondences among languages, rather than on direct textual records. Ongoing research combines internal evidence with archaeological and historical data to clarify homeland, chronology, and contact patterns.