American Turkic

American Turkic (natively known as Qirqiz til, IPA: [ˈq'i˞ˌq'ɪz t'ɘl], literally "Kyrgyz tongue"), is a Turkic language spoken in Western North America in an alternate history timeline. It has about 102 million native speakers (about 87 million of them live in North America), and an additional 21 million people can speak it as a second language, according to a worldwide census that took place in 2020, just in time for the coronavirus pandemic.

History
The language that evolved into American Turkic descended directly from Orkhon Turkic. The Yenisei Kyrgyz developed their own dialect of Old Turkic based on the Orkhon variety, and it eventually became its own language after their speakers migrated to the Manchuria after a failed rebellion against the Uyghur Khaganate in 840 CE, defeating both the Yenisei Kyrgyz and Tang China.

After a coalition between the Jurchens and Kyrgyz against the Khitans failed again in 892 CE, the Kyrgyz were forced to migrate again, but this time to the Americas, bringing some Afanasevans they brought as slaves (see the Afanasevan article), where they arrive at the 900s after crossing the Bering Strait. This disrupts the entire Western Hemisphere's balance of power.

After the reigning Khagan died without any heirs in 1392, the entire country divided into several warlord states and the language fell out of fashion. Fortunately, Kyrgyzia reunited in the 1480s, just in time for Christopher Columbus to arrive at the Caribbean.

After the 15th century, a new swing of European loanwords were borrowed into the language, but in the modern language, Chinese is the biggest influencer.

Classification and Dialects
American Turkic is definately a Turkic language, and is a descendant of Orkhon Turkic. It is the least conservative of the bunch, which made most linguists in this alternate timeline deny this connection until the 1900s, although it shares thousands cognates with the Turkic languages spoken thousands of miles away (see the Swadesh list at the very end). Due to imperialism in the 19th century, there are three major dialects of American Turkic: one in North America, one in Southern Africa, and one in Polynesia.

Allophony
Lots of allophony with consonants can take place in American Turkic, including, but not limited to:
 * [k] and [x] tend to become palatal following front vowels or [j]. This allophony has since become phonemic after [j] was lost after these palatal consonants (but the loss only happened in North America).
 * [v] becomes [w] when it occurs before a stressed vowel.
 * [v] in unstressed syllables tends to be realized as [β̞].
 * Non-ejective, non-aspirated, or non-prenasalized [t] tends to become [ɾ] between vowels.
 * Plosives (but not ejectives) tend to become aspirated in the onset of a stressed syllable (but not when they occur after sibilants).
 * Nasals become [ɴ] before uvular plosives.
 * Stops become prenasalized when they occur after a nasal vowel (but aspirated and ejective stops are excluded from this rule). They become plain nasals before another plosive, which causes that plosive to become prenasalized, which deletes the nasal in the process.

Vowels
Note that nasal vowels can create near-homophones, such as teri and tęri, which means "skin" and "god" respectively. The two words have the same consonants and vowels, with a difference in nasalization (i.e. [tɛ˞i] and [tɛ̃ɹi]). This has gave rise to several alternate Kyrgyz Internet memes, similar to how near-homophones in Standard Chinese based off tones gave rise to the "Grass Mud Horse" meme in our timeline. Note: R-coloring is not phonemic.

Allophony Depending on Stress
/i/: [i (1st stress) ~ ɪ (2nd stress) ~ ɘ (no stress)]

/ɛ/: [ɛ (1st stress) ~ æ (2nd stress) ~ ɜ (no stress)]

/a/: [a (1st stress) ~ ɜ (2nd stress) ~ ə (no stress)]

/u/: [u (1st stress) ~ ʊ (2nd stress) ~ ɵ (no stress)]

/ɔ/: [ɔ (1st stress) ~ ɑ (2nd stress) ~ ɞ (no stress)]

/ʉ/: [ʉ (1st stress) ~ ɵ (2nd stress) ~ ə (no stress)]

Vowel Harmony
American Turkic has a vowel harmony system where front and back vowels cannot exist within the same word. Central vowels are neutral and can coexist with each set. This system applies to every word, even loanwords. There are no exceptions.

Phonotactics
The syllable structure of American Turkic is (C)(C)(C)V(C).

American Turkic allows only voicless sibilant + plosive + liquid or plosive + liquid as clusters in onset.

American Turkic prohibits consonant clusters in coda

American Turkic prohibits both diphthongs and geminants

Stress System
In words with at least three syllables, primary stress falls on the second one, unless the first one has a coda. Otherwise, primary stress falls on the first one. Secondary stress, however, always falls on the last syllable. When there is one syllable in the word, there is no stress.

Writing System
American Turkic uses a variant of the Latin alphabet as its writing system. It has a couple of digraphs. The ogonek < ̨ > is used to denote nasal vowels. There is also a Cyrillic alphabet that exists, but very few people use it, because the Cyrillic version is used in the American branch of the Russian Orthodox Church only. Overall, the spelling is accurate with pronounciation, but it fails to account for prenasalization (See the consonant allophony for more information).

Nouns
TBA

Copula prefix: tur-
American Turkic uses tur as a copula, which is ultimately derived from Proto-Turkic *tur- and means "to stand." It can be a prefix. This has evolved into a perfective-imperfective distinction in tense.

This article will use kük ("to see") as an example.
 * Kük sę mę. "I see you"
 * Turkük sę mę. "I am seeing you"
 * Sǫkük sę mę. "I saw you"
 * Sǫturkük sę mę. "I was seeing you"
 * Ketkük sę mę. "I will see you,"

Syntax
The word order in American Turkic is VOS, or verb-object-subject, which it follows strictly.

Numbers
American Turkic is a hybrid vigesimal-decimal. Historically, it was pure vigesimal, but decimal was introduced by the Europeans in the ~17th century.
 * 1: id
 * 2: ih
 * 3: üç
 * 4: teret
 * 5: beş
 * 6: altu
 * 7: yedi
 * 8: seqiz
 * 9: doquz
 * 10: dekę
 * 11: ǫd
 * 12: ǫuh
 * 13: ǫüç
 * 14: ǫtorot
 * 15: ǫboş
 * 16: ǫaltu
 * 17: ǫyodu
 * 18: ǫsoquz
 * 19: ǫdoquz
 * 20: kal
 * 30: drita
 * 40: kuvatuworgodą
 * 50: kuvügodą
 * 60: seksagidą
 * 70: septagidą
 * 80: oktogüdą
 * 90: nǫagüdą
 * 100: ketą
 * 400: yüz
 * 1,000: mile
 * 8,000: bin
 * 160,000: van
 * 1,000,000: miliyan
 * 3,200,000: kįçil
 * 64,000,000 (obsolete, used in some poetry in the modern language (because kal kįçil or seksagidą miliyan would take a lot of characters)): alo
 * 1,000,000,000: biliyarad
 * 1,000,000,000,000: triliyan

Swadesh list
Note: The list isn't done yet.

Example text
TBA