Old Turkic

The earliest written Turkic language, the speech of the Türk qaghanates and their Uyghur successors as carved on the memorial stelae of the Mongolian steppe. The great inscriptions of the Orkhon valley, raised for Kül Tegin and Bilge Qaghan in the 730s and for the counselor Tonyuquq a few years earlier, are the oldest substantial texts in any Turkic language, and with the Yenisei epitaphs and the Uyghur-era stones they carry the corpus from the late seventh century to the fall of the steppe qaghanates in the ninth. The people of these texts call themselves Türük, the name this atlas uses as the language’s own; the texts name no separate word for their language. Old Turkic is the headwater of the entire Turkic family’s written history, and the wellspring from which the name “Turk” entered every neighboring civilization’s records.

The script, conventionally called runiform for its angular resemblance to the Germanic runes, is an original creation whose letterforms likely owe something to Sogdian models. It runs right to left, writes most consonants in paired back-vowel and front-vowel series, and leaves many vowels unwritten, so that readings rest on the philological tradition founded on Vilhelm Thomsen’s 1893 decipherment. The qaghanate’s earliest monument, the Bugut stele of the 580s, is written not in Turkic at all but in Sogdian, the chancellery language the Türks first borrowed; the runiform script that replaced it is treated in this atlas through the standard Turcological transliteration of Tekin and Erdal.

@misc{onomastikon-old-turkic,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Old Turkic},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/old-turkic}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}