The following is an abstract of a long paper that will be published in one of three or four books of the series The Handbook of Endangered Turkic Languages which will be published in late September by the Turkish-Kazakh Joint University in Ankara, Turkey. The article is 88 pages along and is one of the most important articles in the series. I will also be the official English editor for all of the English articles in the series which total ~500 pages.
Mutual Intelligibility Among the Turkic Languages
By Robert Lindsay
Abstract: The Turkic family of languages with all important related dialects was analyzed on the basis of mutual intelligibility: to determine (1) To determine the extent to which various Turkic lects can understand each other (2) To ascertain whether various Turkic lects are better characterized as full languages in the own right in need of ISO codes from SIL or rather as dialects of another language. (3) The history of various Turkic lects was analyzed in an attempt to write a proper history of the important lects. (4) An attempt was made at categorizing the Turkic languages in terms of subfamilies, sub-sub families, etc. The results were: (1) Rough intelligibility figures for various Turkic lects, related lects and Turkish itself were determined. Surprisingly, it was not difficult to arrive at these rough estimates. (2) The Turkic family was expanded from Ethnologue’s 40 languages to 53 languages. A few existing languages were re-analyzed as dialects of another language. (3) Full and detailed histories for many Turkic lects were written up in a coherent, easy to understand way, a task sorely needed in Turkic as histories of Turkic lects are often confused, inaccurate, controversial, and incomplete. (4) A new attempt was made at categorizing the Turkic family that rejects and rewrites some of the better-known characterizations.