Altaic Languages

Altaic Languages, family of 65 languages spoken by about 167 million people in around 23 different countries, in a vast area of Eurasia extending from Turkey in the west to the Sea of Okhotsk in the east. It consists of three main subfamilies or groups: Turkic (by far the largest), Mongolic, and Tungus.

Foremost among the Turkic languages is Turkish or Osmanli (Turkey, the Balkans) spoken by about 50 million people in Turkey and surrounding areas. Other Turkic languages include Azerbaijani (Azerbaijan and north-western Iran), Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, and Kyrgyz (Kyrgyzstan), Tatar (Turkey, the Balkans, the former USSR, and China), Uighur (Sinkiang-Uighur Autonomous Region, China), and Yakut (mainly north-eastern Siberia). The Mongolic languages include Buriat (Mongolia, China, Russia), Kalmyk-Oirat (chiefly the Kalmykia autonomous region), and the most widely spoken of the group, Mongolian (Mongolia, Russia, China). Among the Tungus group, Manchu (Dongbei in China) had the greatest number of speakers and was formerly a lingua franca between China and the outside world for over 200 years, but is today practically extinct. Other languages of this group include Evenki (China and the former USSR), and Even (Russia, near the Sea of Okhotsk). The first Altaic linguistic records date from the 8th century ad and there is evidence that a variety of writing systems were used, the first being that of the Turkic peoples.

Altaic languages are generally characterized by an agglutinative type of suffixation, and by vowel harmony (that is, only vowels of the same colouring can occur in the same word); the vowels of the suffixes are altered so that they agree with the colour of the root vowel. Altaic languages lack grammatical gender, articles, and prepositions. They have a rich variety of vowels, but a relatively meagre selection of consonants. Many of these features are shared by Japanese and Korean, which, for this reason among others, are believed by many linguists to be distantly related to the Altaic family. However, the exact origins of these two languages remain unknown. Some scholars group the Altaic languages together with the Uralic languages in a larger Ural-Altaic grouping; recent researchers, however, increasingly believe that too little evidence exists to support such a grouping.

Certain Altaic-speaking peoples are important historically, for example, the nomadic Huns and Mongols, who invaded Europe between the 4th and 13th centuries ad, and the Manchus of the Qing dynasty who ruled China from 1644 to 1912. Turkish has been written with various scripts since the 8th century; the Mongolian script was in use by the 12th century.

Since World War I there have been significant changes in the Altaic languages, brought about primarily by the need for modernization to accommodate political changes and increasing literacy. These changes have been particularly notable in Turkey where an essentially new literary language has been developed, based on the existing national language.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.