Languages of West and Central Asia: Turkic

Turkic languages are a subfamily of the Altaic languages. The family currently has 20 standard languages with the total number of speakers exceeding 125 million. Languages extend across Eurasia. This entry discusses the phonology, morphology, syntax, and other linguistic features of these languages.

The genetic relation among the members of the Turkic family is evident in the structural similarities in the phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties of the individual languages. Some structural features are also common to Eurasian languages of the Altaic and Uralic types. The oldest surviving Turkic texts date to the Orkhun inscriptions of the 6th century located in present-day Mongolia.

The subclassification of the family is based on geographic distribution as well as similarity in genetic features. A common classification of the subfamilies and ...