Turkic

The Turkic languages are spread across Central Asia. Grammatically most of them share the features of agglutinisation and vowel harmony. The Turkic languages' relationship to other language families is cloudy. Some linguists consider Turkic and two other Central Asian language families, Mongolic and Tungusic, to be branches of a superfamily they call Altaic. However this theory is not universally accepted. An even smaller number of linguists believe Japanese and Korean form two more branches of Altaic. There are many more Turkic languages not yet represented here, including Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uyghur, and Uzbek.

Tatar: Notes: The Tatars are a Turkic people who swept into western Russia and ruled the country from the 13th to the 16th Centuries. Speaker: (N)

Turkish: Notes: Turkish is a popular example of an agglutinative language, in which concepts are strung together in one word. Whereas "I can't speak" in English is broken up into several words, Turkish tacks on suffix after suffix. Thus the second word of the phrase can be read as "speak-not-I". Speaker: Hüseyin Özhan (N)