TURKMEN LANGUAGE

'Turkmen' (Latin script: türkmen, Cyrillic: түркмен, ISO 639-1: tk, ISO 639-2: tuk) is the name of the national language of Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 3,430,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 5,500,000 people in other countries, including Iran (2,000,000),Iraq ( 2,500,000), Afghanistan (500,000), and Turkey (1,000). Up to 50% of speakers in Turkmenistan also claim a good knowledge of Russian.

Contents

Classification and related languages

Writing System

Sounds

Vowels

Consonants

Grammar

Vowel Harmony

Verbs

Grammatical Cases

Suffixes

References

External links

Classification and related languages

Turkmen is in the Turkic family; sometimes grouped in the larger, but disputed Altaic language family. It is a member of the southwestern Turkic language family, more specifically the East Oghuz group. This group also includes Khorasani Turkish. Turkmen is closely related to the Crimean Tatar and Salar languages, and less closely related to Turkish and Azerbaijani.
Turkmen has vowel harmony, is agglutinative, and has no grammatical gender or irregular verbs. Word order is Subject Object Verb.

Writing System

Main articles: Turkmen alphabet

Officially, Turkmen currently is rendered in the “Täze Elipbiýi,” or “New Alphabet.” However, the old "Soviet" Cyrillic alphabet is still in wide use. Many political parties in opposition to the authoritarian rule of President Niyazov continued to use the Cyrillic alphabet on websites and publications, most likely to distance themselves from the alphabet that Niyazov created.
Before 1929, Turkmen was written in a modified Arabic alphabet. In 1929–1938 a Latin alphabet replaced it, and then the Cyrillic alphabet was used from 1938 to 1991. In 1991, the current Latin alphabet was introduced, although the transition to it has been rather slow. It originally contained some rather unusual letters, such as the pound, dollar, yen, and cent signs, but these were later replaced by more orthodox letter symbols. In 2002, the days of the week and the months were renamed according to the ideology of Ruhnama.
Written Turkmen today is based on the Yomud dialect.

Sounds

The following phonemes are present in the Turkmen language:

Vowels

Turkmen contains both short and long vowels. Doubling the duration of sound for a short vowel is generally how its long vowel counterpart is pronounced. Turkmen employs vowel harmony, a principle that is common in fellow Turkic languages. Vowels and their sounds are as follows:

	front		central1	back
	unrounded	rounded		unrounded	rounded
Close	i/и [i]	ü/ү [y] üý/үй []		y/ы []	u/у [u]
mid	e/е [e]	ö/ө []			o/о [o]
open	ä/ә []		a/а [ɑ̟]

#For purposes of vowel harmony (see below), the central vowel is considered back.

Consonants

Turkmen consonant phonemes (shown in Turkmen alphabet):

	Bilabial	Dental/ alveolar	Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar/ uvular	Glottal
plosive	p b п б [p] [b]	t d т д [t̪] [d̪]			k g к г [k]/[q] [g]/[]
nasal	m м [m]	n н [n]			ň ң []
trill		r р [r]
fricative	f w ф в [] []	s z с з [] []	ş ž ш ж [] []		h х [h]/[x]
affricate			ç j ч җ [] []
approximant		l л [l]		ý й [j]

Grammar

Vowel Harmony

Like other Turkic languages, Turkmen is characterized by vowel harmony. In general, words of native origin consist either entirely of front vowels (inçe çekimli sesler) or entirely of back vowels (ýogyn çekimli sesler). Prefixes and suffixes reflect this harmony, taking different forms depending on the word to which they are attached.
The infinitive form of a verb determines whether it will follow a front vowel harmony or back vowel harmony. Words of foreign origin, mainly Russian, Persian, or Arabic, do not follow vowel harmony.

Verbs

Verbs are conjugated for singular and plural number and first, second, and third persons. There are 11 verb tenses: present comprehensive (long and short form), present perfect (regular and negative), future certain, future indefinite, conditional, past definite, obligatory, imperative, and intentional. The presence of so many tenses may intimidate speakers of languages with a smaller set of tenses, but due to the consistent logic of Turkmen's conjugation, their use is not as daunting as it may appear.
There are two types of verbs in Turkmen, distinguished by their infinitive forms: those ending in the suffix "-mak" and those ending in "-mek". -Mak verbs follow back vowel harmony, whereas -mek verbs follow front vowel harmony.

Grammatical Cases

The Turkmen language has several cases: nominative, possessive, dative, accusative, locative, and instrumental. Pronouns are declined as follows:

Pronoun Cases
Nominative	men / I	sen / you (sing. Inf.)	ol / he/she/it	biz / we	siz / you (pl. or for.)	olar / they
Possessive	meniň / my	seniň / your	onyň / his/her/its	biziň / our	siziň / your	olaryň / their
Dative	maňa / to me	saňa / to you	oňa / to him/her/it	bize / to us	size / to you	olara / to them
Accusative	meni / me	seni / you	ony / him/her/it	bizi / us	sizi / you	olary / them
Locative	mende / upon me	sende / upon you	onda / upon him/her/it	bizde / upon us	sizde / upon you	olarda / upon them
Instrumental	menden / from me	senden / from you	ondan / from him/her/it	bizden / from us	sizden / from you	olardan / from them

Suffixes

Suffixes, or "goşylmalar," form a very important part of Turkmen. They can mark possession, or change a verb.
To make a verb passive: -yl/-il; -ul/-ül; -l
To make a verb reflexive: -yn/-in; -un/-ün; -n
To make a verb reciprocal: -yş/-iş; -uş/-üş; -ş
To make a verb causative: -dyr/-dir; -dur/-dür; -yr/-ir; -ur/-ür; -uz/-üz; -ar/-er; -der/-dar; -t
Suffixes reflect vowel harmony.

References

Garrett, Jon, Meena Pallipamu, and Greg Lastowka (1996). “Turkmen Grammar”. www.chaihana.com.

External links

★ Turkmen - English Dictionary

★ Turkmen - English Dictionary

★ Turkmen entry in the Ethnologue

★ Learn turkmen language on Tmchat Forums (Russian)

★ Omniglot page on Turkmen