Languages: Turkic

Linguistic characteristics.

One notable characteristic of the Turkic languages is vowel harmony. The vowels are of two kinds--front vowels, which are produced at the front of the mouth (e,i,, ), and back vowels, produced at the back of the mouth (a,i,o,u). Purely Turkic words can contain only all front or all back vowels, and all suffixes and affixes must conform to the vowel of the syllable preceding them in the word. Thus, Turkish kl 'ash,' k l-ler 'ashes,' kl-ler-i 'its ashes,' k l-ler-in-den 'from its ashes,' as opposed to kul 'slave,' kul-lar 'slaves,' kul-lar-i'his slaves,' kul-lar-in-dan 'from his slaves.' Besides this "palatal harmony," most Turkic languages also adopt a "labial harmony" between syllables with respect to rounded and unrounded vowels. Only rounded vowels may occur after an initial rounded vowel in a word, with the same pattern holding true for unrounded vowels--e.g., Turkish pul-u 'his stamp,' versus pil-i 'his battery.' These harmony rules vary considerably across the various languages. Due to foreign influence, harmony is phonetically differently realized, though far from lost, in the Karaite, Gagauz, and Uzbek languages.

The morphology of the Turkic languages is agglutinative; i.e., it offers rich possibilities of expanding word stems by means of relatively unchangeable suffixes, many of which designate grammatical notions. For example, the word evlerimde 'in my houses' is composed of ev 'house,' ler = plural suffix, im = possessive suffix 'my,' and de = locative suffix 'in.' When attached to a word with back vowels, such as oda 'room,' these suffixes change their vowels according to the law of vowel harmony but retain their meaning: odalarimda 'in my rooms.'

The Turkic languages mostly lack subordinative conjunctions and relative pronouns, using verbal nouns, participles, and converbs instead. Thus the sentence 'I know that the person who had come went away' is rendered in Uzbek Kelgn kisining ketg nini bilm n, literally 'Having-come person-of having-gone-his know-I.'