Turkic

The Turkic family comprises more than thirty-five languages spread across Eurasia, grouped into branches of Common Turkic and the separate Oghuric branch, whose only surviving member is Chuvash.

Linguists place their Proto-Turkic homeland in the Mongolia to Sayan-Altay region of inner Asia. During the Turkic expansion of the 500s to 1000s the languages spread across Central Asia as far as the Middle East and southeastern Europe.

The oldest surviving texts are the Orkhon inscriptions of the Göktürks, erected in the 720s and 730s in a runiform Old Turkic script. In the 1070s Mahmud al-Kashgari of the Kara-Khanid Khanate compiled the first comparative dictionary of Turkic speech, while after the conversion to Islam most western and central Turkic peoples came to write their languages in the Arabic script.