Product Description

The Turkic languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area from the Balkans to the Arctic Ocean and from Southern Iran to China. There are currently 20 languages in the group, the most important being Turkish (50 Million speakers) other major languages are Azerbaijanian, Bashkir, Chuvash, Kazakh, Tatr, Turkmen, Uyghur, Uzbek and Yakut.

The Turkic Languages is the first reference book to bring together detailed discussions of the historical development and specialized linguistics structures and features of the languages in the Turkic family.

Each chapter contains modern linguistic analysis with traditional historical linguistics, allowing for easy typological; comparison of the languages.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #114266 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 504 pages

Customer Reviews

Deserves to be the standard reference in English for anyone interested in this language family
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 Turkish 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.