Turkmen/Introduction

 Contents - Alphabet >>

 GIRIŞ 

 Intro duction 

About this book
Hoş geldiňiz (IPA: [hoʃ geldiŋið]), or welcome, to the Turkmen Wikibook, perhaps the only learning resource available which can teach you the Turkmen language for free! Besides, isn't that what the wiki philosophy is all about, as well as letting others edit these free resources?! Speaking of the latter, anyone can freely contribute to this growing Wikibook (Turkmen: Wikikitap), so if you would like to add extra content or correct any errors, feel free to do so by clicking on the edit button at the top of the page. It's that simple!

Characteristics of this book
This book is written in British English, so all the usual rules apply, for example: colour, not color; holiday, not vacation, etc.. It is assumed that those who don't speak British English shouldn't have a problem with this and should be able to understand British English.

The Turkmen in this book is in the Latin script rather than the now-defunt Cyrillic alphabet. However, despite the fact that the Cyrillic alphabet is no longer used to write Turkmen, for those interested, the Alphabet page of this book will touch on it. There can also sometimes be variances in the letters used in Turkmen to denote a particular sound, for example Ňň as opposed to Ññ, or Ýý as opposed to Ÿÿ. In this Wikibook, the letters Ňň and Ýý shall be used.

The Turkmen language

 * See also: Wikipedia:Turkmen language

The Turkmen language is one of the many Turkic languages spoken in Eurasia, thus being similar, at differing levels, to languages such as Azerbaijani, Turkish and Uzbek, among other Turkic languages. It is spoken by approximately 9 million people worldwide; it is spoken by 3,430,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by approximately an additional 5,500,000 people in other countries, including Iran (2,000,000), Iraq (1,500,000), Afghanistan (500,000), and Turkey (1,000,000).

Although knowing another Turkic language is an advantage to learning Turkmen, this book assumes no prior knowledge of any Turkic language at all, so don't worry. In some ways Turkmen is an easy language to learn. Unlike Russian or Spanish, Turkmen has no genders. There are no irregular verbs. For the most part, words are written exactly as they are pronounced. Finally, Turkmen's grammatical case system is remarkably simple once understood, and has almost no exceptions.

The greatest difficulty for beginning Turkmen speakers will probably be adapting to Turkmen's elaborate system of grammatical suffixes, or "tag words" and learning to re-order their speech so that the predicate (verb) is the last thing spoken. Also, many simple English grammatical structures (such as "to have", "to need", or "to be able to") are handled differently in Turkmen.