Mahmud al-Kashgari wrote the Compendium of the Turkic Dialects between 1073 and 1077.[1] The book belongs to the eleventh century, long after the khaganates. It records dialects from the inside and is the earliest evidence for several of them.[2] What follows reports what he says of the Oghuz and the Kipchak. It shows their speech as it stood in his day, and it can be set beside the older evidence of the inscriptions only with care.

Their place in his list

Kashgari lists the Turkic tribes in order from the west, beginning with those nearest to Rum. The list runs: Bachanak, Kipchak, Oghuz, Yemek, Bashkirt, Basmil, Qay, Yabaqu, Tatar and Kirghiz. The Kirghiz are the last and the nearest to Sin, which is China.[3] A second list follows, of tribes that lie between south and north: Chigil, Tukhsi, Yaghma, Oghraq, Charuq, Chomul, Uyghur, Tangut, Khitay and Tawghach.[3]

Among the nomads, he says, the Kirghiz, Kipchak, Oghuz, Tukhsi, Yaghma, Chigil, Oghraq and Charuq speak “pure Turkic, a single language”.[4] Next to these stands the speech of the Yemek and the Bashkirt. The language of the Bulgar, the Suvar and the Bachanak, who live toward Rum, is “Turkic of a single type with clipped ends”.[5]

He gives three ranks of dialect. The lightest is that of the Oghuz. The most correct is that of the Yaghma and the Tukhsi and of those who live on the rivers Ila, Artish, Yamar and Atil as far as the land of the Uyghur. The most elegant is that of the khaqani kings and those who associate with them.[6] He places the river Atil, which the translators identify with the Volga, in the country of the Kipchak.[7]

The sound changes he names

Kashgari holds that there is “very little variation in the basic language” and that the differences lie in the alternation or the loss of certain letters.[6] Under this heading he names the following changes, and he gives his examples with the Oghuz and the Kipchak side by side.

  • Initial y is dropped or becomes j. The Oghuz and the Kipchak change y- at the beginning of a word, whether noun or verb, to a vowel or to j. The Turks say yelgin, “traveller”, and these peoples say elgin. The Turks say yinčü, “pearl”, and they say jinčü.[6]
  • Initial m becomes b. The Oghuz, the Kipchak and the Suvar change an initial m to b. The Turks say män bardim, “I went”, and they say bän bardum.[8]
  • Initial t becomes d. The Oghuz and those who follow them change t to d. The word for “camel” is tewe in Turkic and dewe with them. Kashgari adds that most d of the genuine Turks correspond to t in the Oghuz dialect, as in bögdä, “dagger”, which the Oghuz say böktä.[8]
  • The sound w. The Oghuz and those who follow them change a sound between Arabic f and b to v. The Turks say aw, “house”, and they say av. The Turks say aw, “the hunt”, and they say av.[8]
  • The sound of the dotted dāl. Kashgari writes one sound of the Chigil and other Turks with the dotted dāl of the Arabic script, and he transcribes it ḏ. The Yaghma, Tukhsi, Kipchak, Yabaqu, Tatar, Qay, Chomul and Oghuz change it to y, and he says that they never pronounce it as dāl. Some of the Kipchak, the Yemek, the Suvar and the Bulgar, and those who live toward Rus and Rum, change it to z. The word for “foot” is aḏaq in the first speech, ayaq in Oghuz and azaq in the west.[8] In his summary he puts the z with the Kipchak, and a few lines earlier he lists the Kipchak among the peoples who say y. The two statements agree only if some Kipchak said y and others said z.
  • Loss of the medial γ. The Oghuz and the Kipchak agree in dropping a medial γ in nouns and in the verbal noun of continuous action. The Turks say čumγuq, “white-footed crow”, and they say čumuq. The Turks say awkä barγan ol, “he is one who often goes home”, and the Oghuz say awkä baran ol.[9]

The words he marks as theirs

Many entries of the dictionary carry the note “Oghuz dialect” or “Kipchak dialect”. A few examples show what kind of words these are.

  • aliγ, “bad”, is of the Oghuz and Kipchak dialect.[10]
  • ükil, “much”, is of the Kipchak dialect.[11]
  • ayiγ, “bear”, is the form of the Oghuz, the Kipchak and the Yaghma for the adiγ of the Turks. This is the change of d to y from the list above.[12]
  • ilik, “marrow”, is of the Oghuz dialect, and among the Turks it is yilik.[7]
  • ayaq in the sense of “bowl” is unknown to the Oghuz, who call a bowl čanaq.[12]
  • tariγ means “wheat” among most of the Turks and “millet” among the Oghuz. Kashgari adds that the Oghuz sense is wrong.[13]

Words of the Oghuz that the dictionary treats with disfavour are also on record. Kashgari says of ören that the Oghuz forgot many Turkic words when they mixed with the Persians, and that they used the Persian word.[14] Of one entry that he marks as Oghuz, he says that others change two of its sounds, that he thinks this form not genuine, and that nevertheless “the Kipchak and other crude peoples” use the word.[14]

The translators’ interpretation

The translators of the dictionary draw two conclusions from these passages. The first concerns the dividing line. By their count, the most significant cleavage of the dialects is between the Oghuz, with the Kipchak, on one side and the Chigil, with the Tukhsi and the Yaghma, on the other. Kashgari does not call these differences a matter of purity, since he counts all of these peoples among those who speak “pure Turkic”.[15]

The second concerns the Oghuz. Kashgari seems to hold two views of them. On one side, the Oghuz dialect has “suffered much admixture from corrupting elements”, and the Oghuz neighbour the Arghu, so that there is admixture in their speech. On the other side, it is “pure Turkic” and “the lightest of the dialects”. The translators note that Kashgari also speaks of the “refinement” of the Oghuz, and they understand the whole as an ambiguous attitude.[16]

Bearing on Old Turkic

The handbook of Old Turkic uses Kashgari’s Oghuz forms for the sounds of the older language. The Oghuz cognates of äšgäk, “donkey”, and bušgak, “asthma”, lack the velars of the Old Turkic words. They show that the Old Turkic forms must have had g and not k. Two negated imperatives that Kashgari gives as Oghuz and Kipchak forms show that d had become y in some early dialects by the second half of the eleventh century.[17] The handbook also records the view that the Orkhon language stands close to Oghuz. The view rests on the hortative in -(A)lIm and the future in -dAčI, and the handbook says that it deserves further consideration.[18] See Old Turkic.

The limits of the account

Kashgari was not a field researcher in the modern sense. His information on the dialects has not been matched in full with modern and comparative data, and there is as yet no conclusive investigation of how reliable it is.[2] Some scholars hold that he knew very little of the Turkic dialects of the west, and what he knew was second-hand.[19] In his day several types of Turkic were spoken in Volga Bulgaria, among them Oghur and Common Turkic. A remark of Kashgari on the Bulgar therefore cannot be taken as a remark on one language.[19] See Oghur Turkic.

For the peoples see the Oghuz and the Kipchak. For the Khalaj, whom Kashgari counts among the Turkmen, and for the Arghu see the Khalaj language.

References

  1. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk
  2. ^ a b Erdal 2004, p. 8
  3. ^ a b Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 82
  4. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 83
  5. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 83–84
  6. ^ a b c Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 84
  7. ^ a b Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 112
  8. ^ a b c d Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 85
  9. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 86
  10. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 106
  11. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 113
  12. ^ a b Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 120
  13. ^ Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 45
  14. ^ a b Dīvān Lughāt al-Turk; al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 47
  15. ^ al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 46
  16. ^ al-Kāshgharī 1072–1074, p. 47
  17. ^ Erdal 2004, p. 9
  18. ^ Erdal 2004, p. 11
  19. ^ a b Golden 1980, p. 56

Sources

Literature

  • Maḥmūd al-Kāshgharī, Dīwān Lughat al-Turk (1072–1074)
  • Marcel Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic (2004)
  • Peter B. Golden, Khazar Studies, Vols. I–II (1980)

Related

What links here1

Languages
Oghur Turkic

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Oghuz and Kipchak speech in Kashgari.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/languages/kipchak-and-oghuz-in-kashgari/

Last revised: 8 November 2026