Ebook: A short descriptive grammar of Turkmen language

Cheltenham, 1994 : 2004. — 16+16 p.Turkmen is a Turkic language, part of the South-Western or Oguz sub-group which includes Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Gagauz. It is an agglutinative language i.e. it has a highly developed system of noun and verb suffixes that can produce some very long words indeed, e.g. from the word okuw which means ‘study’ the following word / sentence can be derived: okuwçylaryňkymyka? – I wonder if it belongs to the school children? There are over six million speakers of Turkmen world-wide, most of them located in Turkmenistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. Turkmen society is still fairly tribal, so that the Turkmen language is made up of several dialects. The literary language dates back to the 18 th century, with poets such as Magtymguly writing highly stylised works including many Persian (Farsi) loan-words. Modern literary Turkmen is mainly based on the Teke and Yomut dialects spoken in and around Ashgabat, Mary, Dash Oguz (formally Dashhowuz) and Nebitdag. Although Turkmen residents of the larger cities tend to be strongly bilingual in Turkmen and Russian, any attempts to Russify the literary language have been resisted, although many technical words are Russian or have come via Russian. Dialects spoken in Iran tend to be influenced by Farsi and those in Afghanistan Dari and Uzbek. This grammar concentrates on Turkmen as spoken in Turkmenistan.