The Turkic language family

Turkic languages are spoken on a huge geographic area streching from the Balkans through Central Asia to the Arctic Ocean (map). They are documented from the 8th century on and represented later by a number of literary languages such as Old Uyghur, Chaghatay and Ottoman. There are about twenty literary Turkic languages today, for example Azerbaijanian, Turkmen, Uzbek, Tatar, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Uyghur and Yakut. Turkic languages exhibit a linguistic type which is well-represented in the languages of the world and are significantly different from the standard European type; thus the study of Turkic languages is also of interest for general linguistics.

Turkic studies at Uppsala university

The Swedish government made the decision that Uppsala University should take national responsibility for education and research in Turkic languages. The Department of linguistics and philology, which accommodates linguistics and even studies of many of the languages of the Near East, Western and Central Asia, and the Far-East, is an ideal academic setting for Turkic studies.

Research in Turkic languages focuses on comparative Turkic linguistics and literary studies. Present projects include study of the linguistic landscape in 17th century Istanbul, Ottoman in non-Arabic script, copulas in Turkic languages, Uyghur and Kazakh morphosyntax, Turkish 20th century novels, and Karaim translations of the Hebrew bible. Special importance is given to the documentation and maintenance of peripheral Turkic languages such as Karaim in Lithuania, Noghay in the Caucasus, and Kashkay in Iran. The further development of a Swedish-Turkish-English parallel corpus is an interdisciplinary project. Further issues dealt with are theoretical and applied aspects of teaching Turkish.

Uppsala university has a long tradition in conducting studies on Oriental languages including Turkic. Several famous scholars have studied Turkic languages, just a few of them can be mentioned here, such as Gustaf Peringer Lillieblad (1651-1710), Walther Björkman (1896-1996), Lars Johanson. Read more about Swedish discoveries in the Turkic world. For more information, see also under the heading "Projects".