THE HISTORY OF THE PHENOMENON OF AFFIXATION IN TURKIC LANGUAGES​AND ITS IMPACT ON THE UZBEK LANGUAGE

Abstract

The Turkic languages are agglutinative in that affixation is the primary means of expressing grammatical and derivational meanings. This morphemic system has demonstrated extraordinary diachronic stability throughout the Turkic family, specifically through the widespread application of suffixation. The Uzbek language, as a member of Karluk branch, is continuous with the central Turkic languages in kind; it retains the basic suffixal structure of Old and Middle Turkic languages and is heavily influenced by contacts with Persian, Arabic, and now Russian. Despite this, while Turkic morphology has been a topic of intense historico-comparative research, especially from an areal perspective, the history of affixation from Old Turkic through Middle Turkic and Modern Uzbek has not been systematically traced, and clear cases of contact-induced phonological and/or semantic change in affixation are neglected. In this paper, the historical process of emergence in Turkic languages and the extent of the structural and functional impact of this process on Uzbek are analysed. Comparative analysis shows that Uzbek has the main Turkic suffixes preserved, such as -lik, -chi, -da, but phonetic reduction and loss of vowel harmony in Uzbek essentially changed meanings. This work combines historical-comparative and typological methods to connect ancient philological evidence with modern morphological data, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding continuity and change in affixation in Uzbek. The findings thus improve theoretical understanding of the resilience of inflectional morphology under contact and offer practical recommendations for Uzbek language teaching, lexicography, and computational linguistics.