The Khalaj language

Khalaj is a Turkic language of central Iran.^[1] The people who speak it are named in the sources from the early eighth century on, and the article on the Khalaj tells what the sources say of them.

The language has no early text. The early record gives a name, a title and the notices of the geographers. The living language gives a set of features that the other Turkic languages lost, and these features bear on how Old Turkic is read.^[2]

The early record

A Bactrian manuscript of 711 names a Khalaj princess.^[3] It writes the Turkic word for a consort, kïnžuy, seven times of her.^[3] A reading of the manuscript gives her name as Bilgä Sävüg. The manuscript has bilgah savoh, and its script does not tell the rounded vowels apart.^[4] The manuscript shows that Turkic-speaking Khalaj lived in northern Afghanistan. It is not a text of their language.^[5]

The Muslim geographers name the Khalaj as well, and they often confuse them with the Karluk, because the Arabic script writes the two names almost alike.^[1] Kashgari, writing in the 1070s, places the Khalaj among the Turkmen.^[1] The article on the Khalaj sets these notices out.

Retained features

The handbook of Old Turkic points to the following features.

An initial h. Proto-Turkic had an h at the beginning of words. Khalaj keeps it systematically, and the other languages keep it here and there.^[6]
Long vowels. Proto-Turkic had eight long and eight short vowels in first syllables. Khalaj keeps the length to a large extent, as do Yakut and Turkmen.^[7]
A nasal where Old Turkic had a palatal nasal. The Old Turkic ñ is n in Khalaj. The skin on milk is kanak in Khalaj, where most Turkic languages have kaymak.^[8]
A dative in -kA. The Old Turkic dative of nouns was +kA in all its varieties. Today this form is found only in Khalaj. Kashgari’s dictionary says that the Arghu used it too.^[9]
Forms of the verb. A converb in -di or -ti corresponds in Khalaj to the common Turkic -(X)p.^[10] The auxiliary ïd-, “to let go”, has become part of the imperative of certain Khalaj verbs.^[11] The suffix -gUr, found in Old Uyghur curses, is still in use in Uzbek, Bashkir and Khalaj.^[12] The word yurt, “encampment”, is derived from a verb that Khalaj has, yuor-, “to sit or stay at some place”.^[13]

The initial h

The initial h is the feature that bears most on the history of Old Turkic. The h appears in an eighth-century Tibetan itinerary on the peoples of the north. The itinerary names a people ud hadaklïg, “bovine-footed”, and a people hala yuntlug, “possessing parti-coloured horses”. The words hadak and hala are the ones normally known as adak, “foot”, and ala, “parti-coloured”.^[6] The itinerary is not written in Turkic. Its author could have taken the words at an earlier stage of the language, or from a dialect like Khalaj that kept the sound.^[14] See the Old Tibetan northern report.

Whether Old Turkic itself had the sound is argued. The Orkhon language may have had h as an actual sound, because the runiform letter for a is sometimes written where the comparison leads one to expect a and never where it leads one to expect ha.^[14] Others find this evidence scant and inconclusive. The runiform and the Uyghur scripts have no letter for the sound, and the scripts that could show it, Manichaean and Indic, do not. In the Tibetan-script catechism of the tenth century the words whose Khalaj cognates begin with h are written without it. They hold that no h can be posited for Old Turkic proper.^[14] Both sides agree that the sound belonged to Proto-Turkic, and that an unstable initial y in Old Uyghur and in the runiform manuscripts is its trace.^[15]

The Arghu

Kashgari says that the people of Arghu change a medial or final y to n. His examples are qoy, “sheep”, which they say qon, and qayu, “which”, which they say qanu.^[16] The Arghu speech as he describes it shares several features with Khalaj, among them n for the older ñ and the dative in +kA.^[17]

Khalaj has been derived from the speech of the Arghu and called a new Arghu. Against this, the Bactrian documents show the Khalaj as a people in northern Afghanistan before the Arghu appear in the sources.^[5]

Place in the family

The classification of Khalaj is open. One classification counts it among the seven main languages of the family, beside Chuvash, Yakut, the South Siberian languages, Kipchak, Uyghur and Oghuz.^[18] The same account lists it with a query under the south-western, or Oghuz, languages.^[19] Its opponents treat it as an Oghuz speech.^[1] The survey of the Turkic languages sets Khalaj and Arghu together in a group of their own.

The handbook of Old Turkic counts Khalaj, with Common Turkic and Chuvash, among the descendants of Proto-Turkic.^[2] For the reconstruction of that parent language Khalaj is therefore a witness of the first rank, and for the study of Old Turkic it shows what the inscriptions do not write. See Old Turkic for the language of the inscriptions.