Editing Turkish language (section)

== Classification ==
{{Main|Turkic languages}}

Turkish is a member of the [[Oghuz languages|Oghuz]] group of the [[Turkic languages|Turkic]] family. Other members include [[Azerbaijani language|Azerbaijani]], spoken in [[Azerbaijan]] and north-west [[Iran]], [[Gagauz language|Gagauz]] of [[Gagauzia]], [[Qashqai language|Qashqai]] of south [[Iran]] and the [[Turkmen language|Turkmen]] of [[Turkmenistan]].<ref name="Studia Turcica 1971">Aalto, P. "Iranian Contacts of the Turks in Pre-Islamic times", in&nbsp;Studia Turcica, ed. L. Ligeti, Budapest, 1971, pp. 29–37.</ref>

Historically the [[Turkic languages|Turkic]] family was seen as a branch of the larger [[Altaic languages|Altaic]] family, including [[Japanese language|Japanese]], [[Korean language|Korean]], [[Mongolian language|Mongolian]] and [[Tungusic languages|Tungusic]], with various other language families proposed for inclusion by linguists.<ref>Benzing, J.&nbsp;Einführung in das Studium der altäischen Philologie und der Turkologie, Wiesbaden, 1953.</ref>

Altaic theory has fallen out of favour since the 1960s, and a majority of linguists now consider Turkic languages to be unrelated to any other language family, though the Altaic hypothesis still has a small degree of support from individual linguists.<ref>{{Citation |last=Starostin |first=George |title=Altaic Languages |date=2016-04-05 |url=https://oxfordre.com/linguistics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-35 |encyclopedia=Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics |access-date=2023-07-11 |language=en |doi=10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.35 |isbn=978-0-19-938465-5}}</ref> The nineteenth-century [[Ural-Altaic]] theory, which grouped Turkish with [[Finnish language|Finnish]], [[Hungarian language|Hungarian]] and [[Altaic languages|Altaic]] languages, is considered even less plausible in light of Altaic's rejection.<ref name="Ural-altaische Jahrbücher 1958">Gandjeï, T. "Über die türkischen und mongolischen Elemente der persischen Dichtung der Ilchan-Zeit", in&nbsp;Ural-altaische Jahrbücher&nbsp;30, 1958, pp. 229–31.</ref> The theory was based mostly on the fact these languages share three features: [[agglutination]], [[vowel harmony]] and lack of grammatical gender.<ref name="Ural-altaische Jahrbücher 1958" />