Turkic language in Iran – past and present

This volume is meant to be a contribution to Iran-Turkic linguistic studies. Its articles originate from papers presented at the final symposium of the Turcological project group within the Collaborative Research Center “Cultural and linguistic contacts: processes of change in historical areas of tension in Northeast Africa/West Asia” at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (“Turcological research projects at Mainz”). The Turcological project dealt with Turkic linguistic varieties in the contact areas of West Iran and its neighboring regions and analyzed the consequences of linguistic contacts for the emergence of new structures. The research was based on both new fieldwork in the area and the analysis of older manuscripts. Two contributions make an attempt to summarize characteristic features of their respective linguistic material – be it of recent or historical origin – with additional samples of text. Other articles discuss specific linguistic features of modern and older Iran-Turkic varieties in the context of contact-induced or intra-Turkic developments in Oghuz Turkic; yet others deal with the place of an early manuscript in the debate on the emergence of written Western Oghuz, with the analysis of an older source for colloquial Ottoman and Persian and their interrelations, and with the position of Iran-Turkic within a greater linguistic contact area.