LANGUAGE

Turkmen (Latin script: Türkmen, Cyrillic: Түркмен, ISO 639-1: tk, ISO 639-2: tuk) is the name of the national language of Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 3,430,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 3,000,000 people in other countries, including Iran (2,000,000), Afghanistan (500,000), and Turkey (1,000). They speak the Turkmen language which is classified as part of the Western Oghuz branch of Turkic languages family together with Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Turkoman spoken in Iraq. Up to 50% of speakers in Turkmenistan also claim a good knowledge of Russian.

The Spoken Language:

Turkmen belongs to the family of Turkic languages spoken in Eastern Europe (Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash), the Caucasus (Azeri, Kumik), Siberia (Yakut, Tuva, Khakas), China (Uygur, Kazak), Central Asia (Kazak, Kyrgyz, Uzbek), and the Near East (Turkish, Azeri). Its closest relatives are the languages of the Turks in northeastern Iran and the Khorazm Province of south central Uzbekistan (Khorasani), Azerbaijan (Azeri), and Turkey (Turkish), all of which belong to the Oghuz group of this language family.

Classification and related languages:

Turkmen is in the Turkic family; sometimes grouped in the larger, but disputed Altaic language family. It is a member of the southwestern Turkic language family, more specifically the East Oghuz group. This group is also comprised of Khorasan Turkic. Turkmen is related to Crimean Tatar and Salar, and less closely related to Turkish and Azerbaijani.  Turkmen has vowel harmony, is agglunative, has no grammatical gender, and no irregular verbs. Word order is Subject Object Verb. 

Writing System:
Officially, Turkmen currently is rendered in the “Täze Elipbiýi,” or “New Alphabet.” However, the old "Soviet" Cyrillic alphabet is still in wide use. Many political parties in opposition to the current authoritarian rule in Turkmenistan use the Cyrillic alphabet on websites and publications, most likely to distance themselves from the alphabet created by President Niyazov. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets for Turkmen that is as follows: 

A, B, Ç, D, E, Ä, F, G, H, I, J, Ž, K, L, M, N, Ñ, O, Ö, P, R, S, Ş, T, U, Ü, W, Y, Ý, Z

Before 1929, Turkmen was written in a modified Arabic alphabet. In 1929–1938 a Latin alphabet replaced it and then the Cyrillic alphabet was used from 1938 to 1991. In 1991, the current Latin alphabet was re-introduced, although the transition to it has been rather slow. When it was first reintroduced it was supposed to contain some rather unusual letters, such as the pound, dollar, yen, and cent signs, but these were later replaced by more orthodox letter symbols. In 2002, the days of the week and the months were also renamed.  

Sounds
The following phonemes are present in the Turkmen language:

Vowels
Turkmen contains both short and long vowels. Doubling the duration of sound for a short vowel is generally how its long vowel counterpart is pronounced. Turkmen employs vowel harmony, a principle that is common in fellow Turkic languages. Vowels and their sounds are as follows: 

Consonants
Turkmen consonant phonemes (shown in Turkmen alphabet):

Vowel Harmony
Vowel harmony is where all words, at least of a non-borrowed origin, consist either entirely of front vowels (inçe çekimli sesler) or entirely of back vowels (ýogyn çekimli sesler); this includes prefixes and suffixes.

The infinitive form of a verb determines whether it will follow a front vowel harmony or back vowel harmony. Words of foreign origin, mainly Russian, Persian, or Arabic, do not follow vowel harmony. 

Verbs
There are both singular and plural tenses for all first, second, and third person verb conjugations. There are 11 verb tenses in Turkmen. These include: Present Comprehensive (long & short form), Present Perfect (regular and negative), Future Certain, Future Indefinite, Conditional, Past Definite, Obligatory, Imperative, and Intentional. The presence of so many tenses may intimidate native English speakers, but due to Turkmen's inherent logic in its conjugation, the task of conjugating verbs is not as daunting as it may appear. 

Infinitive Forms of Verbs
There are two types of verbs in their infinitive forms in Turkmen; those ending in the suffix "-mak" and those ending in "-mek". -Mak verbs follow back vowel harmony, whereas -mek verbs follow front vowel harmony.

Grammatical Cases
Like Latin, the Turkmen language has several cases. They are as follows: the Nominative case, the Possessive case, the Dative case, the Accusative case, the Locative case, and the Instrumental case. Pronouns also have different case endings. 

Suffixes
Suffixes, or "goşylmalar," form a very important part of Turkmen. They can mark possession, or change a verb.

To make a verb passive: -yl/-il; -ul/-ül; -l To make a verb reflexive: -yn/-in; -un/-ün; -n To make a verb reciprocal: -yş/-iş; -uş/-üş; -ş To make a verb causitive: -dyr/-dir; -dur/-dür; -yr/-ir; -ur/-ür; -uz/-üz; -ar/-er; -der/-dar; -t

Note: the suffixes are dependent on the ending of the infinitive form of the verb.

In language, Turkmens speak Turkmen, related most closely to Turkish and Azerbaijani. Virtually everyone, however, even in the remote desert regions, speaks Russian.