Kipchak

The Kipchak or Northwestern Turkic languages descend from the speech of the Kipchak and Cuman nomads who dominated the Pontic-Caspian steppe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries; their medieval form is recorded in the Codex Cumanicus of 1303.

After the Mongol conquest of Cumania the language became the Turkic speech of the Golden Horde, whose ruler Özbeg Khan adopted Islam during his reign from 1312 to 1341. After Timur's invasion of 1396 the Horde fragmented, and during the fifteenth century its lands passed to successor states including the Crimean Khanate and the Kazakh Khanate, each with its own Kipchak dialect.

The Great Horde collapsed in 1502, the literary Cuman of Hungary died out in the early eighteenth century, and the Crimean Khanate was annexed by Russia in 1783. From these forms descend the Tatar, Bashkir, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Nogai languages.