This chapter deals with Turkic registers used for production of texts as cultural artifacts. It comprises orality and literacy, using the label ‘orature’ instead of ‘oral literature’, which is obviously a contradiction in terms (cf. Latin ‹os› ‘mouth’, ‹littera› ‘letter’). Orature utilizes the spoken word, literature the written word.

This chapter provides a very brief sketch of the patterns of culture, lifestyle, and social organization of the Turkic-speaking groups. No single cultural framework unites the whole of Turcia. The groups represent highly different stages of cultural and economic development, modernization, urbanization, dependency on dominant societies, etc. Elements of a common cultural heritage can, however, be found in traditional oral literature and certain folk traditions (Johanson 1988b, 2006a).

This chapter deals with language-specific phonological contrasts in prime syllables, the part of the word that provides optimal distinctiveness, whereas the subsequent parts undergo various neutralizations.

Turkic possesses a number of grammaticalized viewpoint aspect categories. They do not characterize the actional content but express perspectives on events, offering different ways of envisaging them with respect to their outer limits from various points of view (orientation points, vantage points).

The history of Turkic writing systems is highly variegated. Very different sets of graphic signs and orthographic rules have been applied. This chapter will deal with the representation of sound types in some of the systems.

This chapter presents a brief overview of the basic types of phonetically distinct sound segments observed in Turkic, without discussing their phonological roles or diachronic developments.

This chapter deals with morphophonology in polysyllabic word forms. In all known Turkic languages, the phonology of nonprime syllables differs considerably from that of the prime syllables. The oppositions mentioned in Chapter 14 are largely suspended, and assimilations have led to a great deal of irregularities.

The next chapters will deal with a number of Turkic syntactic structures as arrangements of words, phrases, and clauses. Syntactic units occurring in them mostly stand in head vs. dependent (‘nucleus’ vs. ‘satellite’) relationships to each other, but they can also be conjoined, i.e. possess equal functional status.

Action nominals 〈an〉 describe actions and occur in nonmain clauses of various kinds. They display morphological properties typical of nouns, e.g. the ability to take on plural and case markers as well as actional, aspectual, and modal markers (Johanson 1998b: 46). They may be called ‘participles’ in the sense of sharing certain properties of verbs and nouns, but they are certainly not verbal adjectives.

Turkic pronominals are proforms comprising pronouns, pronominal determiners, and deictic proforms derived from them. They constitute morphologically distinct subclasses playing different syntactic roles as personal, demonstrative, interrogative, reflexive, reciprocal, possessive, and indefinite items. Their referents are identified in terms of spatial-temporal deixis and discourse deixis. Owing to the specific Turkic syntactic structure, indigenous relative pronominals are lacking.

Turkic languages offer particularly rich sources of data for the study of language contacts. They have for many centuries been spoken in dynamic contact settings all over their vast Eurasian area of distribution. Continuous massive displacements of Turkic speaker groups have led to encounters with numerous other languages, genealogically related and unrelated, typologically similar and dissimilar. Also, languages spoken in noncontiguous areas have occasionally influenced each other. On general questions of Turkic language contacts, see Johanson (2002a).

Like other Transeurasian languages, almost all Turkic languages possess large inventories of converbs expressing manifold relational concepts in the aspectual-modal-temporal domains.

Turkic possesses rich systems of postpositions, free grammatical relators roughly corresponding to English prepositions. They occur as heads of immediately preceding nominals and nominal phrases, forming postpositional phrases together with them and indicating their syntactic and semantic functions. The grammaticalization has led to a reversal of the modificational structure: The syntactic head modifies the dependent, and not vice versa (Johanson 1973; cf. § 26.8). The postpositions express semantic relations in more differentiated ways than is usually possible by means of case markers.

The following survey of Turkic phonology starts with the structure of so-called prime syllables, defined as the leftmost monosyllabic morphological segment of a word. They form monomorphemic stems or parts of polymorphemic stems. They consist of a vowel nucleus (peak), optionally flanked by consonantal margins, i.e. onset and coda.

This chapter contains brief notes on Turkic prosody as complements to phenomena mentioned in preceding chapters, mainly prosodic accent, boundary tones, copied intonational patterns, and quantitative meter in poetry. Other prosodic features such as rhythm and tempo will not be treated.