Turkish/Mongolian Lexical Borrowings in South Asian Languages

Abstract

Turks and the Turkish language have been in mutual relations with different languages ​​in wide world geography throughout history. There have been approximately 2500 years of mutual linguistic interaction between Turkish and South Asian, especially South West Asian languages. This study brought loanwords and lexical elements borrowed from Turkish and Mongolian into Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, and Balochi. These loanwords and lexical elements have been reconfirmed from etymology dictionaries and given alphabetically as a list. This study consists of a total of 1175 loanwords and lexical elements. There are 427 loanwords and lexical elements from Urdu, 186 from Punjabi, 145 from Sindhi, 362 from Pashto, and 55 from Balochi. Some loanwords in previous studies have been left out of the list by reconfirmation of their etymologies. Finally, we prepared tables of these loanwords and lexical elements in terms of frequency, morphology/etymology, and theme. We made interpretations of said tables. This study is the important on topic because of its collective perspective.

Keywords

• south asian languages
• turkish loanwords
• interlinguistic