Turkmen

Introduction

Turkmen belongs to the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family. It is included in the Turkmenistan Map southern group of the Turkic branch along with Turkish and Azerbaijani. According to Ethnologue, there are 3.4 million speakers of Turkmen in Turkmenistan, a former Turkmen temple constituent republic of the USSR. In addition, there are 0.5 million speakers of Turkmen in Afghanistan and 2 million speakers in Iran. There are also small communities of Turkmen speakers in Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.

Groups of Turkic-speaking people migrated to southwestern areas of Central Asia during the 5th-6th centuries AD. The largest migration occurred in the 10th century when Oghuz tribes migrated from Mongolia to the area between the Ural mountains and the Aral sea. It was then that the term Turkmen was first mentioned. Despite some strong regional divisions, these tribes eventually came to regard themselves as a single people. The Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic was established in 1924. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it became the newly independent Republic of Turkmenistan in 1990.

Turkmen

Turkmen, a camels

long with Russian, became the national language of the newly independent Republic of Turkmenistan in 1990. Over 90% of the population of Turkmenistan claim Turkmen as their mother tongue, while 50% report being bilingual in Turkmen and Russian. Along with Russian and mostly recently with English, it is used today in government administration and in all official situations. It is the medium of instruction in most elementary and secondary schools. There have been attempts to use Turkmen as a medium of instruction in institutions of higher learning as well. Turkmen is also used in radio and television broadcasts. There are a number of newspapers, magazines, and books in the language. Recently, English has been added to the curriculum, and is now listed as the third state language of Turkmenistan.

Dialects

Since Turkmen is spoken in several countries, it is not surprising that it consists of a continuum of varieties differing from each other in a pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. Linguists usually divide them into two groups, although there is some disagreement about this breakdown.

• major or central dialects: Yomud, Teke (Tekke), Goklen, Salyr, Saryq, Esari, and Cawdur;
• peripheral dialects.

Structure

Sound System

children

old men

Turkmen

The sound system of Turkmen shares several important features with the sound systems of other Turkic languages.

Vowels
Turkmen has nine vowels. They can be either short or long. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning. The vowel system is very symmetrical and can be described in terms of the presence or absence of three features: +/- high, +/- back, +/- round.

x	Front		Back
x	Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Rounded
High	/i/	/ü/	//	/u/
Mid	/e/	/ö/	xx	/o/
Low		x	/a/	x

As all other Turkic languages, Turkmen is characterized by vowel harmony, a type of phonological process that involves constraints on which vowels may be found near each other. Vowels in Kazakh words must harmonize with one another in terms of front versus back, and rounded versus unrounded. , Suffixes added to stems must harmonize with the vowels of the stems, e.g., the plural marker has the form -ler when added to kadi, and the form -lar when added to mugallym.

Consonants
Turkmen has 23 consonants, plus two marginal ones that are used only in borrowed words.

Consonants
Turkmen has a large inventory of consonants. There are no consonant clusters at the beginning or end of words.

xxx	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Dental	Alveolar	Post-alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops	p - b	xx	t - d	xx	x	xx	k - g	x	x
Fricatives	x	f - v	x	s - z	-	x	x		h
Affricates	xx	x	x	xx	t - d	x	x	x	x
Nasals	m	x	n	xx	xx	x		xx	x
Tap (flap)	xx	x	xx	r	xx	xx	xx	x	x
Laterals	xx	xx	x	xx	l	xx	x	x	x
Semi-vowels	w	xxx	xx	xx	x	j	x	x	x

	sh in shop
	s in measure
t	ch as in chap
d	j as in job
x	no equivalent in English
	no equivalent in English
	ng in sing
j	y as in yet

Click here to listen to basic words and phrases in Turkmen.

Grammar

Turkmen Man

old woman

Turkmen Girl

Like all Turkic languages, Turkmen is agglutinative, i.e., grammatical relations are indicated by the addition of suffixes to stems. There are no prefixes. There is a one-to-one relationship between suffix and meaning, so suffixes are strung together one after another, resulting on occasion in long words. There are various rules for their ordering. Turkmen uses postpositions rather than prepositions to signal certain grammatical relationships.

Noun phrase
Turkmen nouns have these features:

no grammatical gender;
two numbers: singular and plural;
cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative. Cases are marked by inflectional suffixes and are governed by verbs and postpositions.
no articles

Verb phrase
Verbs agree with their subjects in person and number. Verbs have the following grammatical categories:

two numbers: singular and plural;
three persons: 1st, 2, 3rd;
five moods: indicative, dubitative, imperative, conditional, subjunctive;
two voices: active and passive;
three tenses: present, past, future;
evidentiality is required at all times. It indicates whether evidence exists for a given statement. Turkmen contrasts direct information (reported directly) and indirect information (reported indirectly).

Word order
As in other Turkic languages, Turkmen sentences have a Subject-Object-Verb word. Other word orders are also possible, depending on discourse-oriented considerations such as emphasis.

Vocabulary

Turkmen Man

Turkmen Woman

Turkmen's basic lexical stock is Turkic in origin. The language has also borrowed words from Arabic (salam 'peace'), Farsi (kerwen 'caravan'), and Russian (shchi 'beet soup'). Below are a few common phrases in Turkmen.

Salam	Hello.
Sag bolung.	Thank you, so long.
Xosh galyn	Good bye
Bolyar.	OK, fine
Xava.	Yes.
Ek.	No.
Adam	Man
Ayal	Woman

Below are the numerals 1-10 in Turkmen.

Turkmen Numerals

Writing

Turkmen

Turkmen literary tradition dates back to the 14th century AD. Classical literature flourished in the 18th-19th centuries. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a literary language based on spoken Turkmen began to emerge. It was written with the Arabic script until about 1930 when the Latin alphabet modeled on the Turkish orthography was developed. However, in 1940, as part of a russification campaign, it was replaced by an adapted version of the Cyrillic alphabet. It is written with the Arabic and Cyrillic scripts in Afghanistan, and with the Arabic script in Iran.

Since the establishment of an independent Turkmenistan in 1991, Turkmen has been written with a version of the Latin alphabet based on Turkish. It consists of 30 letters which are given below. Some letters (given in parentheses below) are used only in borrowed words.

Turkmen Alphabets

Click here to learn more about the Turkmen alphabet.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Turkmen.

Resources

Click here to find out where Turkmen is taught in the United States.
Click here to find materials for studying Turkmen.

Online resources for the study of Turkmen
Peace Corps Turkmen Language Manual
UCLA Language Profile for Turkmen
Altas: Turkmen Language Portal
Orientaal's links to Turkmen
Turkmenistan Chaihana Language Resources
Ethnologue Report for Turkmen
Wikipedia article on Turkmen language
Omniglot guide to Turkmen alphabet
BBC News Country Profiles
Library of Congress Portals to the World
SEELRC Turkmen Webliography