Turkic Dialect Continuum
Turkic languages are best described as a dialect continuum. Geographically this continuum starts at the Balkans in the west with Balkan Turkish, includes Turkish in Turkey and Azerbaijani language in Azerbaijan, extends into Iran with Azeri and Khalaj, into Iraq with Turkmen, across Central Asia to include Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, to southern Regions of Tajikistan and into Afghanistan. In the south, this continuum starts in northern Afghanistan, northward to the Chuvashia. In the east it extends to the Republic of Tuva, the Xinjiang autonomous region in Western China with the Uyghur language and into Mongolia with Khoton. This entire territory is inhabited by Turkic speaking peoples. There are four varieties of Turkic which are geographically outside this continuum: Chuvash, Yakut and Dolgan. These languages have been geographically separated from the other Turkic languages for extensive period of time and Chuvash language stands out as the most divergent from other Turkic languages. There are also Gagauz speakers in Moldavia and Urum Speakers in Georgia.
The Turkic continuum makes internal genetic classification of the languages problematic. Chuvash, Khalaj and Yakut are generally classified as significantly distinct, while the remaining Turkic languages are quite similar, with a high degree of mutual intelligibility between not only geographically adjacent varieties, but also between varieties which may be some distance apart. Structurally the Turkic languages are very close to one another, and share basic features such as SOV word order, vowel harmony, and agglutination.
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