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| Middle Turkic | |
|---|---|
| Name | Middle Turkic |
| Region | Central Asia, Siberia, Anatolia, Persia, Caucasus |
| Era | c. 8th–15th centuries |
| Familycolor | Altaic |
| Fam1 | Turkic languages |
Middle Turkic was the stage in the historical development of the Turkic languages roughly spanning the 8th to the 15th centuries. It encompasses a cluster of related lects attested in textual, epigraphic, and manuscript sources produced in polities such as the Uyghur Khaganate, the Karahanids, the Seljuk Empire, the Kara-Khanid Khanate, the Khosrowid territories, and later in the courts of the Ottoman Empire and the Timurid Empire. The period is crucial for understanding the transition from Old Turkic inscriptions and texts to the modern branches represented by languages like Turkish language, Azerbaijani language, Kazakh language, Uzbek language, and Kyrgyz language.
Scholars situate Middle Turkic between the end of the era of the Orkhon inscriptions and the consolidation of early modern varieties in the late medieval period, with common approximate dates c. 700–1500 CE. Periodization schemes distinguish early, middle, and late subperiods aligned to transformations in the Uyghur Khaganate, the rise of the Karahanids, and the conquests of the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan and the administrative reorientations of the Chagatai Khanate. Work by specialists associated with institutions such as the Türk Dil Kurumu and the Soviet Academy of Sciences produced classification models that mark boundaries using textual milestones like the corpus of the Kutadgu Bilig and the Chagatai literary output patronized by rulers such as Tamerlane (Timur).
Middle Turkic varieties were spoken across a broad arc from the Altai Mountains and Dzungaria through the Tarim Basin, across Khwarezm and Khorasan to Anatolia, and into the Caucasus and Crimea. Political centers influencing linguistic change included the Uyghur Khaganate capital at Kültegin regions, the Karakhanid courts at Balasaghun, the Seljuk capital at Isfahan, the Samanid Empire patronage networks, the Ilkhanate administrations, and the Timurid court at Herat. Trade routes such as the Silk Road and diplomatic contacts with Byzantine Empire, Tang dynasty China, and Abbasid Caliphate administrations further shaped lexicon and script choices.
Key representative lects comprise the Old Uyghur variety attested in manuscripts from Dunhuang and Khotan, the Karakhanid Turkic of the Kutadgu Bilig, the early Anatolian Turkic recorded in inscriptions and literary texts after the Battle of Manzikert migrations, and the Chagatai language crystallized under poets and statesmen like Ali-Shir Nava'i. Other named varieties include dialects tied to Khazar territories, the Kipchak corpus preserved in Codex Cumanicus, and the Oghuz branch leading to Ottoman Turkish. Philologists at the Institut d'Asie Centrale and collections curated by the British Library and the Sakae Collection catalog these texts to delineate isoglosses and lexical strata.
Middle Turkic phonological systems show continuities and innovations relative to Old Turkic: retention of vowel harmony in many varieties, progressive palatalization processes influenced by contact with Persian language and Arabic language, and consonant shifts conditioned by loanwords from Mongolian language and Sanskrit. Morphological features include agglutinative suffixing with extensive case and tense-aspect markings, evidencing continuity with earlier agglutinative patterns recorded in Orkhon inscriptions. Grammatical changes such as the development of evidentiality markers in some Karakhanid and Chagatai texts and the reduction of certain inflectional distinctions prefigure structures in Modern Turkish and Uzbek language. Comparative studies by researchers at Leningrad State University and Leiden University illustrate sound correspondences and morphological reanalysis across the attested corpora.
Middle Turkic was written in multiple scripts reflecting religious and political affiliations: the Old Uyghur alphabet derived from Sogdian alphabet used in Buddhist and Manichaean manuscripts; the Perso-Arabic script adopted for Islamic chancelleries under the Islamization of the Karakhanids; runiform inscriptions like those east of the Ili River; and Latin transliterations in later scholarly editions. Orthographic practices reveal adaptations such as diacritic conventions in Karakhanid manuscripts and Arabic loanword spellings in Seljuk court documents. Archives preserved in institutions like the British Museum, the Hermitage Museum, and the İstanbul Archeology Museums hold important orthographic witnesses.
Significant works include the didactic epic Kutadgu Bilig by Yusuf Khass Hajib, the legal and poetic texts found in the Codex Cumanicus, the Chagatai literary canon exemplified by Ali-Shir Nava'i and court poets of Samarkand, and Uyghur Buddhist and Manichaean religious texts from Dunhuang. Histories and chronicles produced under patrons such as Juvayni and Rashid al-Din contain Turkic glosses and quotations. The manuscript traditions preserved at repositories like Topkapi Palace and the State Public Historical Library of Russia document the flourishing of prose, divan poetry, and administrative literature.
Middle Turkic formed the bridge between Old Turkic epigraphy and the modern Turkic languages, supplying core vocabulary, grammatical patterns, and literary genres adopted by later writers in Istanbul, Baku, Tashkent, and Almaty. Its interaction with Persian language, Arabic language, Mongolian language, and Chinese language produced extensive borrowing that shaped registers in Ottoman Turkish and Chagatai language. Modern comparative projects at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts continue to refine reconstructions, while UNESCO-supported digitization efforts make Middle Turkic manuscripts accessible for philologists and historians working across Eurasian archives.