Altaic Language Family
Introduction
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The Altaic language family derives its name from the Altai Mountain region where scholars believe these languages had originated. It includes 66 languages spoken by about 250 million people. Speakers of Altaic languages live over a vast territory that stretches from northeastern Siberia to the Persian Gulf, and from the Baltic Sea to China, with most of them clustering around Central Asia. There is little written evidence of the historical development of Altaic languages.The earliest Mongolian written records date back to the 13th century AD, while those for Manchu go back only as far back as the 17th century AD. There are two schools of thought about the existence of the Altaic language family.
The status of Korean and Japanese as members of the Altaic language family is particularly debatable. Altaic languages are usually divided into three major groups. The major languages of each group are listed below.
Click here to see interactive maps of Altaic languages. |
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Nine Altaic languages, including Korean and Japanese, have official status in their respective countries.
All languages in the Tungusic group and some languages in the Mongolic and Turkic groups are endangered or facing extinction. |
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Dialects Kalmyk |
The languages in this family, particularly those spoken in more than one country, have a number of dialects, some of them not mutually comprehensible. |
Structure
Sound System
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The sound systems of Altaic languages, with the exception of Japanese and Korean, display a remarkable similarity to each other. For instance, they all share one common feature, namely vowel harmony, a type of phonological process that imposes constraints on which vowels may be found near each other in a word. There are two kinds of vowels -- front vowels, which are produced at the front of the mouth, e.g., /i/, /e/, and back vowels, produced at the back of the mouth, e.g., /a/, /u/, /o/. Native 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. A vowel at the beginning of a word can trigger assimilation of the rest of the vowels in that word, e.g., in Turkish, ev- 'house' + -ler 'plural' is evler 'houses', çocuk- 'child' + -ler 'plural' is çocuklar 'children'. In the first example, all vowels in evler are front vowels. In the second example, all vowels in çocuklar are back vowels. |
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Altaic languages share several grammatical features:
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Vocabulary in Altaic tends to be more similar across languages that belong to one branch, than across the entire Altaic family, as you can see from the names of the numerals 1-10 below.
The vocabulary of individual Altaic languages is influenced by the neighboring languages and by the languages of the dominant powers that colonized them. For instance, Central Asian and Siberian languages spoken on territories formerly dominated by Imperial Russia and later by the USSR, such as Kazakh, Tatar, Yakut, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Uzbek and many others, have many borrowings from Russian, while Turkic languages spoken on the territory of the former Ottoman Empire have a large number of Arabic and Persian loanwords. |
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Writing
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Altaic languages are written in a variety of scripts. Some of them are written in more than one script. . Many languages are still largely oral.
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Resources |
Click here to find out where various Altaic languages are taught in the United States. |
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How difficult is it to learn Altaic languages? Azerbaijani, Mongolian, Turkish and Uzbek are Category II languages in terms of difficulty for speakers of English. Mongolian is more difficult than the other languages in this category. No information is available for the rest of the Altaic languages. |
Click on the name of the language (or language branch) to learn more about it on this website.
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