Turkmen (Latin script: türkmen, Cyrillic: түркмен, ISO 639-1: tk, ISO 639-2: tuk) is the name of the national language of Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 3,430,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 5,500,000 people in other countries, including Iran (2,000,000),Iraq ( 2,500,000), Afghanistan (500,000), and Turkey (1,000). Up to 50% of speakers in Turkmenistan also claim a good knowledge of Russian. Current distribution of Human Language Families A language family is a group of related languages said to have descended from a common proto-language. ... Altaic is a proposed language family which includes 66 languages [1] spoken by about 348 million people, mostly in and around Central Asia and northeast Asia. ... Altaic is a putative language family which would include 60 languages spoken by about 250 million people, mostly in and around central Asia. ... The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China with an estimated 140 million native speakers and tens of millions of second-language speakers. ... The Oghuz languages, a major branch of the Turkic language family, are spoken by more than 110-130 million people (including second language speakers) in an area spanning from the Balkans to China. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. ... ISO 639-3 is an international standard for language codes. ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... The Cyrillic alphabet (or azbuka, from the old name of the first two letters) is an alphabet used for several East and South Slavic languages; (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. ... ISO 639 is one of several international standards that lists short codes for language names. ...

Classification and related languages

Turkmen is in the Turkic family; sometimes grouped in the larger, but disputed Altaic language family. It is a member of the southwestern Turkic language family, more specifically the East Oghuz group. This group also includes Khorasani Turkish. Turkmen is closely related to the Crimean Tatar and Salar languages, and less closely related to Turkish and Azerbaijani. The Turkic languages are a group of closely related languages that are spoken by a variety of people distributed across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China. ... Altaic is a proposed language family which includes 66 languages [1] spoken by about 348 million people, mostly in and around Central Asia and northeast Asia. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families (families hereforth). ... The Oghuz languages, a major branch of the Turkic language family, are spoken by more than 110-130 million people (including second language speakers) in an area spanning from the Balkans to China. ... mother fucking terrorists Khorasani Turkish (تركي خراساني / Xorasan Türkçeəsı) is variety of speech belonging to the Turkic language family. ... Crimean Tatar language (Qırımtatar tili, Qırımtatarca), also known as Crimean (Qırım tili, Qırımca) and Crimean Turkish (Qırım Türkçesi) is the language of the Crimean Tatars. ... Salar is a Turkic language spoken by the Salar people, who mainly live in the provinces of Qinghai and Gansu in China. ...

Turkmen has vowel harmony, is agglutinative, and has no grammatical gender or irregular verbs. Word order is Subject Object Verb. An agglutinative language is a language in which the words are formed by joining morphemes together. ... In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order. ...

Writing System

Main article: Turkmen alphabet

Officially, Turkmen currently is rendered in the “Täze Elipbiýi,” or “New Alphabet.” However, the old "Soviet" Cyrillic alphabet is still in wide use. Many political parties in opposition to the authoritarian rule of President Niyazov continued to use the Cyrillic alphabet on websites and publications, most likely to distance themselves from the alphabet that Niyazov created. The current official Turkmen alphabet as used in Turkmenistan is a modified Latin alphabet based on the Turkish alphabet, but with notable differences: J is used instead of the Turkish C; Ž is used instead of the Turkish J; Y is used instead of the dotless i (I/ı); Ý is used instead...

Before 1929, Turkmen was written in a modified Arabic alphabet. In 1929–1938 a Latin alphabet replaced it, and then the Cyrillic alphabet was used from 1938 to 1991. In 1991, the current Latin alphabet was introduced, although the transition to it has been rather slow. It originally contained some rather unusual letters, such as the pound, dollar, yen, and cent signs, but these were later replaced by more orthodox letter symbols. In 2002, the days of the week and the months were renamed according to the ideology of Ruhnama. The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing languages such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and others. ... On August 10, 2002 the government of Turkmenistan adopted a law to rename all the months and most of the days of week. ... Ruhnama (or The Book of the Soul from Persian: روح ruh (soul) and نامه nāme (book), sometimes spelled Rukhnama) is the combination autobiography, historical fiction, and spiritual guidebook written by Turkmenistans former President for Life, Saparmyrat Niyazov. ...

Written Turkmen today is based on the Yomud dialect.

Sounds

The following phonemes are present in the Turkmen language:

Vowels

Turkmen contains both short and long vowels. Doubling the duration of sound for a short vowel is generally how its long vowel counterpart is pronounced. Turkmen employs vowel harmony, a principle that is common in fellow Turkic languages. Vowels and their sounds are as follows:

1. For purposes of vowel harmony (see below), the central vowel /a/ is considered back.

Vowels Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ... A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. ...

Consonants

Turkmen consonant phonemes (shown in Turkmen alphabet):

In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. ... Dentals are consonants such as t, d, n, and l articulated with either the lower or the upper teeth, or both, rather than with the gum ridge as in English. ... Postalveolar (or palato-alveolar) consonants are consonants articulated with the tip of the tongue between the alveolar ridge (the place of articulation for alveolar consonants) and the palate (the place of articulation for palatal consonants). ... Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). ... Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate (the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum). ... Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. ... Glottal consonants are consonants articulated with the glottis. ...

Grammar

Vowel Harmony

Like other Turkic languages, Turkmen is characterized by vowel harmony. In general, words of native origin consist either entirely of front vowels (inçe çekimli sesler) or entirely of back vowels (ýogyn çekimli sesler). Prefixes and suffixes reflect this harmony, taking different forms depending on the word to which they are attached. Vowel harmony (also metaphony) is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels. ...

The infinitive form of a verb determines whether it will follow a front vowel harmony or back vowel harmony. Words of foreign origin, mainly Russian, Persian, or Arabic, do not follow vowel harmony.

Verbs

Verbs are conjugated for singular and plural number and first, second, and third persons. There are 11 verb tenses: present comprehensive (long and short form), present perfect (regular and negative), future certain, future indefinite, conditional, past definite, obligatory, imperative, and intentional. The presence of so many tenses may intimidate speakers of languages with a smaller set of tenses, but due to the consistent logic of Turkmen's conjugation, their use is not as daunting as it may appear. A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (to decompose (itself), to glitter), or a state of being (exist, live, soak, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (regular alteration according to rules of grammar). ...

There are two types of verbs in Turkmen, distinguished by their infinitive forms: those ending in the suffix "-mak" and those ending in "-mek". -Mak verbs follow back vowel harmony, whereas -mek verbs follow front vowel harmony.

Grammatical Cases

The Turkmen language has several cases: nominative, possessive, dative, accusative, locative, and instrumental. Pronouns are declined as follows: In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun indicates its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause; such as the role of subject, of direct object, or of possessor. ... In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns and adjectives to indicate such features as number (typically singular vs. ...

Suffixes

Suffixes, or "goşylmalar," form a very important part of Turkmen. They can mark possession, or change a verb.

To make a verb passive: -yl/-il; -ul/-ül; -l To make a verb reflexive: -yn/-in; -un/-ün; -n To make a verb reciprocal: -yş/-iş; -uş/-üş; -ş To make a verb causative: -dyr/-dir; -dur/-dür; -yr/-ir; -ur/-ür; -uz/-üz; -ar/-er; -der/-dar; -t

Suffixes reflect vowel harmony.

References

Garrett, Jon, Meena Pallipamu, and Greg Lastowka (1996). “Turkmen Grammar”. www.chaihana.com.

External links

Turkmen language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Turkmen - English Dictionary
• Turkmen - English Dictionary
• Turkmen entry in the Ethnologue
• Learn turkmen language on Tmchat Forums (Russian)
• Omniglot page on Turkmen