Oghuz

Oghuz is the southwestern branch of the Common Turkic languages, named after the Oghuz Turks, who moved out of the Altai Mountains into Central Asia in the eighth century and later carried their speech into the Middle East and the Balkans. From the mid-tenth century the name Oghuz was gradually supplanted among these Turks by Turkoman.

The Oghuz heroic epic, the Book of Dede Korkut, took shape between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. In Anatolia the language became Old Anatolian Turkish, written in the Perso-Arabic script; in 1277 Mehmet I of Karaman issued a firman promoting it against the dominance of Persian. It later developed into Ottoman Turkish and the ancestor of Azerbaijani, while the eastern Oghuz line produced Turkmen.