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Old Turkic (also East Old Turkic, Orkhon Turkic, Old Uyghur) is the earliest attested Turkic language, found in inscriptions by the Göktürks and the Uyghurs in ca. the 7th to 13th centuries AD. It cannot be considered a direct predecessor of the Uyghur language, but elements of Old Turkic can be traced in Middle Turkic such as Chagatai.

Sources of Old Turkic are divided into three corpora:

• the 7th to 10th century Orkhon inscriptions in Mongolia and the Yenisey basin (Orkhon Turkic, or Old Turkic proper)
• 9th to 13th century Uyghur manuscripts from Xinjiang (Old Uyghur), in various scripts including Brahmi, the Manichaean, Syriac and Uyghur alphabets, treating religious (Buddhist, Manichaean and Nestorian), legal, literary, folkloric and astrologic material as well as personal correspondence.
• 11th century Qarakhanid manuscripts, mostly written in Arabic script (Qarakhanid Turkic). The Qarakhanid corpus includes a 6,500 couplet poem, Qutaδγu bilig "Wisdom that brings good fortune", an Arabic-Turkic dictionary and Mahmud al-Kashgari's "Compendium of the Turkic dialects".

Old Turkic has nine vowel qualities—a, e, ė, i, ï, o, ö, u, ü—distinct only in the first syllable of a word, collapsed into four classes elsewhere—a, e, ï, i.

The consonantal system distinguishes between unvoiced, voiced (with fricative variants) and nasal:

labial: p, v (β), m;

dental: t, d (δ), n;

palatal: č, y, ń;

velar: k (q, χ), g (γ), ŋ;

sibilant: s, š, z;

liquid: r, l.

• Middle Turkic
• Proto-Turkic

• M. Erdal, Old Turkic, in: The Turkic Languages, eds. L. Johanson & E.A. Csato, Routledge, London (1998), ISBN 0415082005
• M. Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic, Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8 Uralic & Central Asia, Brill, Leiden (2004), ISBN 9004102949.
• M. Erdal, Old Turkic word formation: A functional approach to the lexicon, Turcologica, Harassowitz (1991), ISBN 3447030844.
• Talat Tekin, A Grammar of Orkhon Turkic, Uralic and Altaic Series Vol. 69, Indiana University Publications, Mouton and Co. (1968). (review: Gerard Clauson, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1969); RoutledgeCurzon (1997), ISBN 0700708693.
• L. Johanson, A History of Turkic, in: The Turkic Languages, eds. L. Johanson & E.A. Csato, Routledge, London (1998), ISBN 0415082005

• Old Turkic (8th century) funerary inscription (W. Schulze)
• VATEC, pre-Islamic Old Turkic electronic corpus at uni-frankfurt.de.

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