The Oghuz languages are a branch of the Turkic language family with roughly 108 million speakers, reflecting the historical migration of Oghuz Turkic peoples from the Altay Mountains through Central Asia to the Middle East and the Balkans. The three largest, Turkish, Azerbaijani and Turkmen, together account for more than 95 percent of all Oghuz speakers, and the branch is further divided into a Western group (Turkish, Azerbaijani, Gagauz, Balkan Turkish), an Eastern group (Turkmen, Khorasani Turkic, Salar) and a Central group (Qashqai, Chaharmahali Turkic, Afshari Turkic, Sonqori Turkic). Oghuz languages share distinctive sound changes, including voicing of certain stops, that set them apart from other Turkic branches.
Facts
RegionThe Middle East, Central Asia and Southeast Europe 1 Speaker Count Proto-Language StatusThe ancestor of the Oghuz branch is debated: the language of the earliest Turkic monuments, the Orkhon inscriptions and Old Uyghur manuscripts, is now generally treated as ancestral to the Central Asiatic Turkic languages such as Karluk and Kipchak rather than to Oghuz directly, so no securely reconstructed Proto-Oghuz text survives from a comparable depth. 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Oghuz Languages
Wikimedia FoundationInfobox, geographic distribution field
Geographic distribution: Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Europe
Classification section, ancestor discussion
The language of the oldest stone monuments such as Orkhon inscriptions, and documents such as Old Uyghur manuscripts are rather the ancestor of Central Asiatic Turkic languages (including Karluk and Kipchak).
Lead section, speaker count
spoken by approximately 108 million people
View the Source Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.