Turkmen Language Services

Turkmen is the national language of Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 3,000,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 380,000 in northwestern Afghanistan and 500,000 in northeastern Iran. Turkmen is in the Turkic Language Family. It is a member of the southwestern Turkic sub-branch, more specifically the East Oghuz group. This group also includes Khorasani Turkic. Turkmen is closely related to the Turkish and Azerbaijani and, and it is for the most part mutually intelligible. Turkmen has vowel harmony, is agglutinative, and has no grammatical gender or irregular verbs. Word order is Subject Object Verb. Written Turkmen today is based on the Teke (Tekke) dialect. The other dialects are Nohurly, Yomud, Änewli, Hasarly, Nerezim, Gökleň, Salyr, Saryk, Ärsary and Çowdur. The Teke dialect is sometimes (especially in Afghanistan) referred to as “Chagatai”, but like all Turkmen dialects it reflects only a limited influence from classical Chagatai. Writing system Officially, Turkmen currently is rendered in the “Täze Elipbiý”, or “New Alphabet”, which is based on the Latin alphabet. However, the old “Soviet” Cyrillic alphabet is still in wide use. Many political parties in opposition to the authoritarian rule of President Niyazov continued to use the Cyrillic alphabet on websites and publications, most likely to distance themselves from the alphabet that Niyazov created. Before 1929, Turkmen was written in an Arabic alphabet. In 1929–1938 a Latin alphabet replaced it, and then the Cyrillic alphabet was used from 1938 to 1991. In 1991, the current Latin alphabet was introduced, although the transition to it has been rather slow. It originally contained some rather unusual letters, such as the pound, dollar, yen, and cent signs, but these were later replaced by more orthodox letter symbols. Verbs Verbs are conjugated for singular and plural number and first, second, and third persons. There are 11 verb tenses: present comprehensive (long and short form), present perfect (regular and negative), future certain, future indefinite, conditional, past definite, obligatory, imperative, and intentional. There are two types of verbs in Turkmen, distinguished by their infinitive forms: those ending in the suffix “-mak” and those ending in “-mek”. -Mak verbs follow back vowel harmony, whereas -mek verbs follow front vowel harmony. Literature The leading Turkmen poet is Magtymguly Pyragy, who wrote in the eighteenth century. His language represents a transitional stage between Chagatai and spoken Turkmen.