Old Turkic language

Old Turkic is the earliest well-attested Turkic language, documented in eighth-century inscriptions and later manuscripts. Its records include the Orkhon inscriptions and Uyghur texts.

Turkic languages: A language family spoken across Eurasia, including Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, and Uyghur. Old Turkic is the earliest extensively documented member of this family.
Orkhon inscriptions: Eighth-century monuments in Mongolia bearing Old Turkic inscriptions about the Göktürk khaganate. They are the language’s most famous and historically rich surviving texts.
Göktürk Khaganate: A Turkic empire that ruled parts of Inner Asia from the sixth to eighth centuries. Its rulers commissioned the best-known Old Turkic monuments.
Agglutinative language: A language type that forms words by attaching clear, separable grammatical affixes to stems. Old Turkic builds many grammatical forms by adding suffixes to word stems.
Vilhelm Thomsen: A Danish linguist who deciphered the Orkhon inscriptions in 1893. His decipherment made the inscriptions readable as Turkic texts.
Orkhon script: An alphabetic script used in early Turkic inscriptions, including monuments in the Orkhon Valley. Its inscriptions preserve the language’s best-known eighth-century records.
Kül Tigin inscription: An eighth-century Old Turkic monument commemorating the Göktürk prince Kül Tigin. Its text provides a major example of formal Old Turkic political language.
Second Turkic Khaganate: A Turkic state in Mongolia from 682 to 744, restored after the collapse of the first khaganate. The Orkhon inscriptions record its rulers, wars, and political ideals.
Vowel harmony: A phonological pattern in which vowels within a word agree in features such as frontness or rounding. It governs the shape of many Old Turkic suffixes.
Vasily Radlov: A nineteenth-century linguist and orientalist who studied and published early Turkic inscriptions and texts. His editions helped establish the scholarly study of Old Turkic documents.

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