Julian Rentzsch: A General Survey on the Turkic Languages

The Department of Middle Eastern Studies at CU FA cordially invites all interested to a lecture by Dr Julian Rentzsch from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz.

Annotation

The Turkic languages are a group of about 40 genealogically related languages spoken in a vast territory extending from Eastern Europe throughout Western and Central Asia to Northeast Siberia by roughly 200 million people. The presentation will start with a brief survey on the Modern Turkic peoples, their languages and their geographical distribution, and continue with the discussion of selected typological similarities and differences among these languages. This will lead us to questions of an internal classification and the impact of heritage, internal developments and language contact as factors in the evolution of specific linguistic features. Besides synchronic information, historical aspects such as the tribal background of the Turkic peoples, historical events leading to the dissemination of peoples and the emergence of languages will be addressed. The presentation will also touch upon the sources in pre-modern Turkic varieties and their value for historical linguistics.