Turkic Languages

About Turkic Languages

Turkic Languages — Journal Profile

Turkic Languages is a peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to linguistic Turcology — the study of the Turkic languages as a field of linguistics — published twice a year in Wiesbaden, Germany, by Harrassowitz Verlag. It was launched in 1997 and has appeared continuously since, reaching volume 28 in 2024. Its print ISSN is 1431-4983, the identifier carried in this JournalsWorld record; bibliographic records for its recent articles also give an electronic ISSN, 2747-450X, which the stored record does not list and which readers should know when searching for the journal’s digital content. The journal’s founding editor is Lars Johanson, professor of Turcology at the University of Mainz and one of the leading Turkic linguists of his generation; the publisher’s pages for the 2024 volumes name Johanson as editor together with Birsel Karakoç and Elisabetta Ragagnin. The University of Uppsala’s linguistics department, announcing the journal’s inclusion in the Web of Science Arts and Humanities Citation Index and in Scopus in 2018, described it — after twenty-two years of publication — as the only scholarly journal in English devoted to the field of Turkic linguistics. That description captures its position exactly: a small, specialist, English-language journal that serves as the central international venue for a whole language family’s linguistics.

The publisher’s own statement of what the journal does is precise and is quoted in substance in the scope section below: it addresses descriptive, comparative, synchronic, diachronic, theoretical and methodological problems in the study of Turkic languages, including questions of genetic, typological and areal relations, linguistic variation and language acquisition; it aims to present work of current interest across the field; and it contains articles, review articles, reviews, discussions, reports and surveys of publications. The journal uses a double-blind review system for choosing articles, and its preferred language of publication is English. Those few sentences, printed by Harrassowitz in every recent volume’s presentation, describe a classical European specialist journal in format and method — semiannual, paperback volumes of roughly 150 to 215 pages, priced as scholarly journal issues — and an unusually wide remit within its specialism, since the Turkic family it covers runs from Turkish and Azerbaijani in the west through the Central Asian languages to Yakut (Sakha) and Dolgan in north-eastern Siberia, plus the historical stages of the family attested from the Old Turkic inscriptions onward.

Quick Facts

Identity and History

Turkic Languages was launched in 1997, at a moment when the field it serves was being reshaped. The collapse of the USSR had opened Central Asia and Siberia to international scholarship, new Turkic republics were developing their own language policies and universities, and the older Turcological traditions of Germany, Sweden, Hungary, Russia and Türkiye needed a common English-language forum. The journal’s founding editor, Lars Johanson — trained at Uppsala, professor of Turcology at Mainz, author of foundational work on Turkic verb systems, aspect and language contact, and editor with Éva Á. Csató of the standard Routledge handbook The Turkic Languages — built the journal as that forum, under the Harrassowitz imprint that also publishes the Turcologica monograph series he founded. The journal’s publication has been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, the German Research Foundation), and the issues from 1997 to 2010 were digitised with DFG support, facts recorded in the journal’s reference summaries and consistent with its character as a publicly valued piece of research infrastructure rather than a commercial title.

Its longevity is itself a datum. Volume 27 appeared in 2023 as a combined double issue (1+2, XII + 214 pages), and volume 28 followed in two issues in 2024 — no. 1 in June 2024 (II + 166 pages) and no. 2 in December 2024 (VI + 156 pages), each priced by the publisher at 64 euro in Germany for the single issue, in the standard Harrassowitz journal format of 17 × 24 cm. The contents of those volumes show the field in miniature. The 2024 issues carry, among their contributions, a historical survey of the Uyghur actional operator by Osman Abdukerim; a study of denying without saying “no” in Kazakh as spoken in China by Hao Guo; an ethnolinguistic vitality study of Khalaj — a small, highly divergent Turkic language of Iran — by Mehmet Akkuş and Soheila Ahmadi; and an analysis of the maintenance of Turkish as a heritage language in north-western Europe by Memet Aktürk-Drake. Another recent volume’s contents list studies of Kazakh verb formation, Kazakh anthroponyms, the vowel system of the Atush dialect of Uyghur, Yakut names of wild edible plants, asymmetric coordination in Turkish, and partial reduplication in Turkish. Descriptive work on individual languages, comparative and typological argument, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics of maintenance and shift: the journal’s scope statement is not boilerplate, it is a table of contents.

Scope and Subjects

The publisher’s scope statement defines the field as linguistic Turcology in the full sense. Descriptive problems: grammars, phonologies, lexicons and texts of individual Turkic languages and dialects, including endangered and little-documented varieties such as Khalaj, Yellow Uyghur, Salar, Chulym or Karaim, whose documentation is a scholarly duty the journal visibly discharges. Comparative and diachronic problems: the reconstruction of Proto-Turkic, the history of the family’s branches — Oghuz, Karluk, Kipchak and Siberian — and the study of its historical stages from Old Turkic runic and Uyghur texts onward. Synchronic and theoretical problems: Turkic languages as evidence for general linguistics, in domains where they are famously instructive — vowel harmony, agglutinative morphology, converb systems, evidentiality, actionality and aspect, complex clause combining. Typological and areal problems: genetic relations, contact and copying between Turkic and neighbouring Mongolic, Tungusic, Iranian, Slavic and other languages across Eurasia. Variation and acquisition: dialectology, sociolinguistics, heritage-language maintenance in diaspora, and language learning. Methodological problems run through all of these, and the journal’s review and discussion sections — review articles, reviews, discussions, reports and surveys of publications — keep the field’s book literature under continuous critical survey, a function of real weight in a discipline whose monographs appear in a dozen countries and languages.

What the journal is not should be stated just as plainly. It is not a journal of Turkish studies in the area-studies sense: Ottoman history, Turkish politics, Turkish literature as literature, and Central Asian area studies belong to neighbouring venues, several of them profiled in this directory, and reach this journal only where language is the object. Nor is it a general linguistics journal that occasionally takes a Turkic example; its centre of gravity is the family itself. For a linguist with Turkic data and a general claim, the choice between Turkic Languages and a general venue turns on audience: this journal guarantees the most expert readership the work will ever have, the readers most able to test its data — and, through its double-blind refereeing by the field’s specialists, the most demanding informed criticism before publication.

Publisher and Editorial Leadership

Harrassowitz Verlag of Wiesbaden is one of Germany’s established scholarly publishing houses, with deep lists in Oriental studies, Turkology, linguistics and library science; its Turcologica monograph series, founded by Lars Johanson in 1985 and now edited by Julian Rentzsch, has published more than one hundred volumes on the languages and literatures of the Turkic world. The journal sits inside that ecosystem: the same scholarly community writes its articles, reviews its books and edits its series. Editorially, the journal was founded by Johanson and long edited by him alone — the publisher’s page for the 2023 combined volume names Johanson as editor — while the two 2024 volumes name an editorial team of Lars Johanson, Birsel Karakoç and Elisabetta Ragagnin, Turkic linguists associated respectively with Mainz and with the Uppsala and wider European Turcology community. Éva Á. Csató, professor emeritus of Turkic languages at Uppsala and Johanson’s co-editor on the Routledge handbook, is recorded as a member of the journal’s editorial board. Uppsala’s involvement is structural rather than incidental: researchers in Turkic linguistics at its Department of Linguistics and Philology contribute to the journal as co-editors and as authors, as the university’s own announcement notes.

Practical publishing facts from the publisher’s volume pages: the journal appears semiannually; issues are paperbound volumes (17 × 24 cm) with the 2024 single issues priced at 64 euro in Germany (65.80 euro in Austria) and the 2023 combined double issue at 128 euro; download purchase of issues is offered through the publisher’s shop; and the journal is also distributed through the Harrassowitz eLibrary for electronic content. No article processing charge is stated in any publisher material fetched for this profile, and none is claimed here; this is a subscription journal of the classical type, and authors should confirm any current practical arrangements directly with the publisher or the editors.

Metrics and Indexing: What Could and Could Not Be Verified

The journal’s indexing milestones are documented by a university source rather than by the publisher’s marketing: Uppsala University’s Department of Linguistics and Philology announced on 10 September 2018 that Turkic Languages (Harrassowitz, ISSN 1431-4983), edited by Lars Johanson, was included in the Web of Science Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) and in Scopus. Its reference summaries likewise list Scopus among its indexing services. The structured indicators carried in this JournalsWorld record give an h-index of 4 and a fourth-quartile (Q4) placement, with coverage years 2017–2024 — figures that describe the record’s citation-window data and sit oddly against the journal’s standing in its own field, a discrepancy this profile reports rather than smooths over: narrow specialist humanities journals accumulate citations slowly, in books as much as in journals, and quartile arithmetic is a poor guide to their real position.

OpenAlex, resolved at checking time through its ISSN endpoint to source S87305266, paints the broader picture: 286 works and 1,367 citations counted for the journal, summary statistics of h-index 15 and i10-index 16, a two-year mean citedness of about 0.17, the publisher named as Harrassowitz Publishing House, country Germany, and the ISSN pair 1431-4983 with 2747-450X (ISSN-L 1431-4983). Its topic classification for the journal runs through linguistics and cultural studies, language evolution, syntax and semantics, and classical studies and philology. The OpenAlex h-index of 15 and the record’s figure of 4 count different universes — OpenAlex over the journal’s whole indexed life including its book-review and discussion content, the record figure over a recent window — and both are reported here with their sources so readers can use each correctly. A Clarivate Journal Impact Factor could not be verified from a fetched source (A&HCI journals are not the population for which that metric is the standard currency), and the DOAJ search API returned no record for ISSN 1431-4983 at checking time, which is reported strictly as “could not be verified” and as nothing more; the journal is a subscription title, and no open-access status is claimed for it.

How to Submit and What to Expect

The publisher’s presentation, repeated in its volume pages, states the two hard rules: the journal uses a double-blind review system in choosing articles for publication, and its preferred language of publication is English. Contributions may take the forms the journal publishes — full articles, review articles, reviews, discussions, reports and surveys of publications — so a scholar with a substantial critical survey or a discussion piece has a recognised route in, not only the standard research article. Submissions are made to the editors; the editorial contact route is through the publisher’s journal pages at Harrassowitz, and authors should follow the publisher’s current instructions at the time of submission, since the fetched volume pages state the review model and language but not a manuscript format specification, a word limit or a timetable. Those items are therefore recorded here as not publicly disclosed in the fetched material, not estimated: in a semiannual journal edited by working specialists, review and production follow the two-issue yearly rhythm, and the 2024 pattern — issue 1 in June, issue 2 in December — is the concrete cadence an author should plan around.

On fit, the test is the scope statement applied honestly: is the manuscript about the linguistics of Turkic languages — descriptively, comparatively, historically, theoretically, typologically, areally, or in variation and acquisition? Does it present data accurately enough to survive refereeing by the specialists who know those languages best? English is the working language, and the journal’s own recent contents show what passes: tightly argued studies grounded in primary data on particular languages, connected to the comparative and theoretical questions of the field. A purely area-studies manuscript, or a Turkish-language-teaching manuscript, will be directed by its own subject matter to other venues; a strong dialect description, a contact-linguistic case study or a typological argument from Turkic data is exactly what the journal exists to print.

Similar Journals and How to Choose

Within Turkology, the neighbouring venues divide by object. Turkic Studies Journal, published by L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University in Kazakhstan and profiled in this directory, covers Turkic studies more broadly from a Central Asian base. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae takes Turkic linguistics within a wider Oriental-studies frame. The Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher tradition covers Turkic alongside Finno-Ugric and other Eurasian languages. For Ottoman and Turkish historical linguistics, journals of Ottoman studies take the philological side, while general linguistics venues — Linguistic Typology, Studies in Language, Folia Linguistica — take Turkic-data papers whose argument is aimed at general theory and a general audience. The honest comparison is audience and refereeing: Turkic Languages offers the field’s own journal, in English, edited from within the discipline’s leading research centres, indexed in A&HCI and Scopus, and read by the scholars most likely to build on the work. For most Turkic linguists that is the first address; general venues are the complement for papers whose main claim is to linguistic theory at large.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was Turkic Languages founded and who publishes it? It was launched in 1997 and is published by Harrassowitz Verlag of Wiesbaden, Germany, appearing twice a year; volume 28 appeared in 2024.

Who edits Turkic Languages? The journal was founded and long edited by Lars Johanson, professor of Turcology at the University of Mainz; the publisher’s 2024 volume pages name Johanson as editor together with Birsel Karakoç and Elisabetta Ragagnin.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 1431-4983, carried in this record and named by the publisher and by Uppsala University. An electronic ISSN, 2747-450X, appears in OpenAlex’s ISSN pair for the journal and in bibliographic records of its recent articles; the stored record lists only the print ISSN.

Is Turkic Languages peer-reviewed? Yes. The publisher states that the journal uses a double-blind review system in choosing articles for publication, and that its preferred language of publication is English.

Where is it indexed? Uppsala University announced in 2018 that the journal is included in the Web of Science Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) and in Scopus. Its OpenAlex source (S87305266) counted 286 works and 1,367 citations at checking time; a DOAJ record could not be verified.

Does it charge authors? No article processing charge is stated in the publisher material fetched for this profile; it is a subscription journal whose issues are sold in print and electronic form. Any current author-side arrangement should be confirmed with the publisher.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on the publisher’s own volume and journal pages at Harrassowitz Verlag (scope statement, double-blind review, preferred language, editors of the 2023 and 2024 volumes, frequency, prices, formats), on Uppsala University’s Department of Linguistics and Philology announcement of the journal’s A&HCI and Scopus inclusion, on the journal’s reference summaries for its 1997 launch, DFG support and digitisation, on Hungarian MTMT bibliographic records giving the electronic ISSN 2747-450X for its 2024 articles, on the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint (S87305266) at checking time, and on the structured indicators carried in the JournalsWorld record itself. The DOAJ search API returned no record for the print ISSN at checking time and is reported only as not verified. Fees, manuscript formats and timetables that no fetched source stated are recorded as not publicly disclosed in the fetched material, and every metric is attributed to the system that produced it.