The Historical Role of Turkish in Relation To Persian of Iran

Abstract

Speakers of Turkic and Iranian languages have been in contact since pre-Islamic times. Buddhist literature of Inner Asia is found in both Old Turkic (Uighur) and Sogdian, and Manichaean literature in Old Turkic, Sogdian, Parthian and Middle Persian, though the extent of early oral contacts and bilingualism cannot be documented. It has long been noted, however, that several of the salient features that distinguish later Middle Persian and New Persian structurally from older forms of Iranian are shared with Turkish notably the absence of grammatical gender and adjectival agreement, and the use of a singular noun after numerals (Doerfer 1967, pp. 57-59). Linguistic convergence during the Islamic period is immediately noticeable in the form of Persian influence on Turkish, i.e., in the vocabulary and syntax of literary Ottoman and Chagatay and their successor languages, modem Turkish and Uzbek. The converse of this Turkish lexical and structural influence on Persian is most striking and best documented at the vernacular level in present-day Central Asia, among speakers of northern Tajik Persian dialects (see Doerfer 1967 and 1992). Apart from lexical borrowing, the sound systems of Tajik and Uzbek over most of the shared dialect area have converged almost completely, and syntactic features characteristic of Turkic are widely shared. Turkish linguistic influence on the spoken Persian of Iran is not so flagrant, and has mostly been ignored except for some indiscriminate listing of loanwords. Phonological convergence is too complex a phenomenon to pursue here; but, for an instance, it may be argued historically that the collapse of /qI (the uvular plosive of Arabic and Turkish, not native to Persian) and /y/ (the uvular fricative common to Arabic, Turkish and Persian), which resulted in the identical pronunciation of qaf and rayn in most of western Iran today, was accomplished by the fifteenth century under the influence of Turkish (Pisowicz, pp. 112-4, 117). As for Turkish lexical and syntactic influence on Persian, for all its subtlety it has nevertheless been significant and pervasive in some domains. We should distinguish two complementary ways in which the advent of the Turks affected the language map of Iran. First, since the Turkish-speaking rulers of most Iranian polities from the Ghaznavids and Seljuks onward were already iranized and patronized Persian literature in their domains, the expansion of Turk-ruled empires served to expand the territcrial domain of written Persian into the conquered areas, notably Anatolia and Central and South Asia. Secondly, the influx of massive Turkish-speaking populations (culminating with the rank and file of the Mongol armies) and their settlement in large areas of Iran (particularly in Azerbaijan and the northwest), progressively turkicized local speakers of Persian, Kurdish and other Iranian languages. Although it is mainly the results of this latter process which will be illustrated here, it should be remembered that these developments were contemporaneous and complementary.