The Turkic Languages

Routledge Language Family

by Lars Johanson (Editor), Aeva Aagnes Csatao (Contributor)

"The Turkic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching from southern Iran to the Arctic Ocean, and from the Balkans to the great wall of China. There are currently twenty literary languages in the group, the most important among them being Turkish with over seventy million speakers; other major languages covered include Azeri, Bashkir, Chuvash, Gagauz, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Noghay, Tatar, Turkmen, Uyghur, Uzbek, Yakut, Yellow Uyghur and languages of Iran and South Siberia. The Turkic Languages is a reference book which brings together detailed discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistic structures and features of the languages in the Turkic family. Seen from a linguistic typology point of view, Turkic languages are particularly interesting because of their astonishing morphosyntactic regularity, their vast geographical distribution and their great stability over time. This volume builds upon a work which has already become a defining classic of Turkic language study. The present, thoroughly revised edition updates and augments those authoritative accounts, and reflects recent and ongoing developments in the languages themselves, as well as our further enhanced understanding of the relations and patterns of influence between them. The result is the fruit of decades-long experience in the teaching of the Turkic languages, their philology and literature, and also of a wealth of new insights into the linguistic phenomena and cultural interactions defining their development and use, both historically and in the present day. Each chapter combines modern linguistic analysis with traditional historical linguistics; a uniform structure allows for easy typological comparison between the individual languages. Written by an international team of experts, The Turkic Languages will be invaluable to students and researchers within linguistics, Turcology and Near Eastern and Oriental Studies"--

Genres: Language, Linguistics

512 pages, Paperback

First published June 18, 1998

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is like a big piece of candy for anyone interested in the Turkic languages. Routledge's Language Family Descriptions series offers single-chapter summaries of the grammars and lexicons of the major members of a family, and their Turkic volume published in 1998 continues the tradition with strong contributions from the leading Turkologists of our time.

There are six chapters on the family as a whole: The Speakers of Turkic Languages (Hendrik Boeschoten), The Turkic Peoples: A Historical Sketch (Peter B. Golden), The Structure of Turkic (Lars Johanson), The Reconstruction of Proto-Turkic and the Genetic Question (Andras Rona-Tas), The History of Turkic (Lars Johanson) and Turkic Writing SYstems (Andras Rona-Tas). The contributions of Johanson and Andras-Rona Tas are extremely helpful for understanding the isoglosses which divide the Turkic family into its various subfamilies, and they give a good overview of the controversies on the reconstruction of proto-languages.

Then there are single chapters on each language or, in a few cases, collections of unstandardized dialects. These are Old Turkic (Marcel Erdal), Middle Kipchak (Arpad Berta), Chaghatay (Hendrik Boeschoten and Marc Vandamme), Ottoman Turkish (Celia Kerslake), Turkish (Eva A. Csato and Lars Johanson), Turkish dialects (Bernt Brendemoen), Azerbaijanian (Claus Schonig), Turkmen (Schonig), Turkic languages of Iran (Gerhard Doerfer), Tatar and Bashkir (Berta), West Kipchak languages (Berta), Kazakh and Karakalpak (Mark Kirchner), Nogay (Eva A. Csato and Birsel Karakoc), Kirghiz (Kirchner), Uzbek (Boeschoten), Uyghur (Reinhard F. Hahn), Yellow Uyghur and Salar (Hahn), South Siberian Turkic (Schonig), Yakut (Marek Stachowski and Astrid Menz), and Chuvash (Larry Clark).

There's also a chapter on the Turkish language reform written by Bernt Brendemoen, though I feel that Geoffrey Lewis' THE TURKIC LANGUAGE REFORM: A Catastrophic Success is the best popular introduction to the affair. I should also note that Marcel Erdal's presentation of Old Turkic is vastly expanded in his later monograph A GRAMMAR OF OLD TURKIC (Amsterdam: Brill, 2004).

My only complaint about this delightful reference is that a number of typos are present, especially in Arpad Berta's contribution on Tatar and Bashkir. These pose little problem for those with some previous experience with the Turkic languages, but may confuse many readers. Shame on Routledge for not correcting these even in the paperback reprint of 2006. Still, this is *the* contemporary introduction to the Turkic family in English, and I recommend it to all linguaphiles.