American Turkic

Note: not to be confused with the American Turkic Business Council.

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. This language is not completed and is still under construction.

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, as mututal inteligability with the dialect spoken by the Uyghurs had declined since at least the 700s, 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) (until they broke off and formed an empire in our world's California), where they arrive at the 900s after crossing the Bering Strait, much as the Dene-Yeniseians crossed it a few thousand years before the migration event long after the land bridge which covered it sunk into the ocean. This disrupts the entire Western Hemisphere's balance of power.



After the reigning Khagan died without any heirs in 1392 after accidental drowning in the Crater Lake, the entire country divided into several warlord states and the language fell out of fashion. After some time, these warlord states eventually coalesced into northern and southern states. Fortunately, Kyrgyzia was reunited in the 1480s by the southern state with the assistance of Californian and Mayan troops, just in time for Christopher Columbus to arrive at the Caribbean only to get crushed because of gunpowder weapons. After the 15th century, a new swing of European loanwords were borrowed into the language via the Pacific ocean and trade with Vinland, 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, and has had huge amounts of semantic drift and influences from Amerindian languages in the region in the past millenium of its history, 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 dictionary). 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. Despite all of this, American Turkic is slightly mutually intelligable with its ancestor language, so an Orkhon Turkic speaker somehow being transported by a time traveller to an alternate Western North America in 2022 would be able to understand people 50% of the time, although the person being transported can understand some basic words.

Language Family
Altaic (disputed) (5500 BCE)
 * Turkic (500 BCE)
 * Common Turkic (300 BCE)
 * Siberian Turkic (Known in this ATL as Sibero-American Turkic) (400 CE)
 * South Siberian Turkic (Known in this ATL as South Sibero-American Turkic) (600 CE)
 * Old Turkic (600 CE)
 * Orkhon Turkic (700 CE)
 * Yenisei-Orkhon Turkic (800 CE)
 * Pre-American Turkic (900 CE)
 * Old American Turkic (1000 CE)
 * Classical American Turkic (1400 CE)
 * Early Modern American Turkic (1700 CE)
 * Modern American Turkic (2000 CE)

Phonology
The phonology is quite unusual for a Turkic language.

Allophony
Lots of allophony with consonants can take place in American Turkic, including, but not limited to:
 * [k] and [x] tend to become palatal consonants 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 the standard North American dialect, which is the dialect used in this article).
 * [v] becomes [w] when it occurs before a stressed vowel.
 * [v] in unstressed syllables tends to be realized as [β̞], especially when it occurs in the onset of a syllable.
 * /l/ becomes [w] in the syllable coda. In some younger speakers, syllable-coda l can be lost entirely, lengthening the preceding vowel.
 * 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. In the South African dialect, prenasalized stops become plain voiced stops. In the Polynesian dialect, prenasalized stops trigger nasal harmony, which gradually spreads to every vowel in a word.
 * k and g become [ts] and [dz] respectively at the end of words for younger speakers, so beg can become [pɜdz]. This can also happen with z becoming [dz] at the end of a word, but the change only occurs after front vowels. Before the allophony took place, /ts/ occured phonemically in loanwords from Russian and written with c, e.g. infarmeciya.

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. [t'ɛ˞i] and [t'ɛ̃ɹi]). This has gave rise to several alternate Kyrgyz Internet memes in the American Turkic language, similar to how near-homophones in Standard Chinese based off tones gave rise to the "Grass Mud Horse" meme in our timeline.

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 coexist within the same word. Central vowels are neutral and can coexist with each set. This system applies to every word, even loanwords, and 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, voiceless sibilant + plosive, plosive + liquid, and voiceless sibilant + liquid as clusters in the syllable onset. Allowed consonant clusters in the syllable onset are bl, br, dl, dr, gl, gr, sb, sbl, sbr, sd, sdl, sdr, sg, sl, sr, sgl, sgr, şb, şbl, şbr, şd, şdl, şdr, şg, şgl, şgr, şl, and şr. In the syllable coda, however, American Turkic prohibits consonant clusters, so the maximum amount of consonants that can occur between vowels is four consonants. American Turkic also prohibits both diphthongs (But pseudo-diphthongs can be created using disyllables (example: ẍaih (which was borrowed from the German word reich), which means "dimension"; pronounced [ˈʁaˌɪx]) or a vowel followed by /j/) 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. There is an exception with primary stress in loanwords from European languages borrowed from the 18th century, where it falls in the syllable where it fell in the original language. Secondary stress, however, always falls on the last syllable, even in loanwords. When there is one syllable in the word, stress is nonexistent.

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, and an acute accent <◌́> is used to denote irregular stress. 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 very phonemic, but it fails to account for prenasalization and velar plosives becoming alveolar affricates (See the consonant allophony for more information). There is also a traditional script in use which is descended from the Afansevan script, in turn descended from Mayan rebus characters. The Latin alphabet will be used for this article because of technical limitations (The traditional characters are not on my PC).

Articles
Unlike most Turkic languages, American Turkic has evolved indefinate and definate articles, which can be placed before nouns. Numbers greater than 1 can also act like articles, which can be used to determine how many of a certain noun there are in the plural form (which I'll call pseudo-articles from now on). This is optional and depends on the speaker, but younger speakers, especially speakers who are members of Gen Z or Gen Alpha, are more likely to use pseudo-articles in casual speech. Articles can only be used on nouns. There are multiple differences to the usage of articles in American Turkic from English:


 * The indefinate and definate articles are used in nouns with the nominative and with all other cases respectively.
 * The definate article is always used for languages other than American Turkic (e.g. u/vu Iŋlen til, literally "the English language."). Note that language names are always followed by til, like in American Turkic's native name.
 * The definate article is used when referring to comfortable objects in the speaker's opinion (e.g. Ją vu katiz mę, literally "I like the cats").
 * The definate article is used when referring to bodies of water (e.g. u/vu Aþbeg or u/vu Neçivą, literally "the Atabeg (the Columbia in OTL).")
 * When the noun is a plural, the indefinate and definate articles are ommited, but pseudo-articles are excluded from this rule.

Case
American Turkic retains all the cases, but the accusative case has evolved into a definate article as shown in the table above. The case system applies to pronouns as well.

Plural Marker
To represent a plural, American Turkic uses -iz or -uz (depending on vowel harmony), if all the vowels in the word being pluralized are neutral then the former is used. This replaced the older -lar suffix, but a few exceptions survive as fossils, such as ǫlar "they" (The nasal vowel in this pronoun evolved from a random mutation, just like the /m/ in most of the first person pronouns evolved from a random mutation in Old Turkic).

Agglutination
One of the features American Turkic has retained from Old Turkic is agglutination, which means words and (sometimes) markers are smashed together to create new words. This obeys American Turkic word order too, e.g. the word for "racism" is külüzelizdikų̈. This can be broken down into kül ("to laugh") and üzelizdikų̈ ("at differences"). The latter can be split into üzelizdik ("differences"), and the genitive case ų̈. The former can be split into üzeliz ("traits") and duk (a loanword from Chinese meaning "unique"). The former can be split into üzel (a back-loan from Turkish meaning "trait") and the plural marker -iz, thus the word for "racism" literally means "to laugh at unique traits," because racism is a concept that is forbidden and frowned upon in the Kyrgyz Khaganate. Remove üzel and iz from the word and you get Küldukų̈, the word for "Sameness" in the American Turkic translation of The Giver, literally "to laugh at uniqueness."

There is a process where sentences with less than three words can be created with verbs, using pronouns as suffixes to refer to who is doing the action. Keytesę debte? and Keyte debte sę? both mean "Are you going to the tomb?", but the latter sentence may not be used in a conversation at all. Note that debte is a loanword from Syriac meaning "tomb."

Copula prefix: tur-
American Turkic has a completely reworked tense system, and uses the prefix tur- as a copula, which is ultimately derived from Proto-Turkic *tur- and means "to stand." The following prefixes can be attached to a verb to indicate that the action will happen in a certain time period. This works differently for different types of verbs.

This article will use kük ("to see") as an example. Tur can also act like a verb in a sentence if another verb is unavailable, e.g. Tur gük tę. ("The sky is blue.").
 * Kük sę mę. "I see you"
 * Turkük sę mę. "I am seeing you"
 * Sǫkük sę mę. "I saw you"
 * Tursǫkük sę mę. "I was seeing you"
 * Ketkük sę mę. "I will see you,"
 * Turketkük sę mę "I will be seeing you."

Syntax
The normal word order in American Turkic is VOS, or verb-object-subject, as seen in the above sentences. The word order can vary between VOS (the default word order, as used in the examples above) and VSO (the word order used in interrogative sentences, e.g. Kük mę sę? "Am I seeing you?" ). Adjectives and adverbs proceed the parts of speech they modify. Interrogative pronouns occur at the end of the sentence (if there is one).

Examples
The below table will show several example sentences demonstrating the features described above.

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: kuvatuvorgodą
 * 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): alo
 * 1,000,000,000: bilyarad
 * 1,000,000,000,000: driliyan

Dictionary
The dictionary can be found at American Turkic/Lexicon (but it is not done yet)

American Turkic folktale
TBA