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5 - Languages of Northern Africa, Middle East and Central Asia

Asya Pereltsvaig
Asya Pereltsvaig
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
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Summary

In the previous chapter, we discussed languages of the Caucasus; in this chapter, we are moving to the region immediately south of the Caucasus – the Middle East – and the geo-linguistically related Near East, North Africa and Central Asia. In addition to Iranian languages from the Indo-European family, already discussed in Chapter 2, we encounter two other major language families in this region: Turkic and Semitic, each to be discussed in a separate section below.

Turkic languages

Turkic languages constitute a large language family of some 40 languages, spoken by approximately 120 million people as a native language across a vast area stretching from the Balkans in the west through the Caucasus and Central Asia and into Siberia and Western China. Recall that we have already encountered several Turkic languages in previous chapters, such as Yakut in northeastern Siberia (Chapter 1) and Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk and Azerbaijani in the Caucasus (Chapter 4).

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Languages of the World
An Introduction
 , pp. 86 - 104
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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