The Kipchak languages (also known as the Kypchak, Qypchaq, Qypshaq or the Northwestern Turkic languages) are a sub-branch of the Turkic language family spoken by approximately 30 million people in much of

Central Asia Central Asia is a region of Asia consisting of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The countries as a group are also colloquially referred to as the "-stans" as all have names ending with the Persian language, Pers ...

and

Eastern Europe Eastern Europe is a subregion of the Europe, European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural and socio-economic connotations. Its eastern boundary is marked by the Ural Mountain ...

, spanning from

Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. Some of the most widely spoken languages in this group are Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tatar.

Linguistic features

The Kipchak languages share a number of features that have led linguists to classify them together. Some of these features are shared with other

Common Turkic Common Turkic, or Shaz Turkic, is a taxon in some classifications of the Turkic languages that includes all of them except the Oghuric languages which had diverged earlier. Classification Lars Johanson's proposal contains the following subgroup ...

languages; others are unique to the Kipchak family.

Shared features

*Change of Proto-Turkic *d to (e.g. *''hadaq'' > ''ajaq'' "foot") *Loss of initial *h, see above example

Unique features

Family-specific

*Extensive labial

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...

(e.g. ''olor'' vs. ''olar'' "them") *Frequent

fortition In articulatory phonetics, fortition, also known as strengthening, is a consonantal change that increases the degree of stricture. It is the opposite of the more common lenition. For example, a fricative or an approximant may become a stop (i ...

(in the form of

assibilation In linguistics, assibilation is a sound change resulting in a sibilant consonant. It is a form of spirantization and is commonly the final phase of palatalization. Arabic A characteristic of Mashreqi varieties of Arabic (particularly Levanti ...

) of initial (e.g. ''*etti'' > ''etti'' "seven") *

Diphthong A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

s from syllable-final and (e.g. *''taɡ'' > ''taw'' "mountain", *''sub'' > ''suw'' "water")

Language-specific

*In both Tatar and Bashkir, the original mid and high vowels are swapped in position by vowel raising and lowering:

Classification

The Kipchak languages may be broken down into four groups based on geography and shared features (languages in bold are still spoken today):

Notes

References

Bibliography

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Kipchak Languages Agglutinative languages Turkic languages Vowel-harmony languages