The Turkic Languages are spoken today in a vast geographical area stretching from the Balkans to the Arctic Ocean and from southern Iran to the great wall of China. There are currently twenty literary languages in the group, the most important among them being Turkish (which has over fifty million speakers); other major languages covered are Azerbaijanian, Bashkir, Chuvash, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Tatar, Turkmen, Uyghur, Uzbek and Yakut. The Turkic Languages is the first reference book for almost forty years to bring 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. 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. Professor Hendrik Boeschoten, University of Tilburg, Netherlands, Professor Lars Johanson, University of Mainz, Germany, Andras Rona-Tas, Szeged, Hungary, Professor Dr Marcel E