Linguistic varieties of Old Turkic

在中国西部发现的8000多个9世纪至14世纪之间的手稿碎片，在蒙古、南西伯利亚和吉尔吉斯斯坦发现的数百个所谓的“统一文字”铭文，其中最古老的可以追溯到7世纪后期，以及11世纪和12世纪的一些穆斯林突厥文本，尽管时间长，覆盖面积大，但可能被认为属于一种单一的语言。该项目计划对该语料库进行调查，以发现语音、形态和词汇特征，从而将文本分配给方言。只有一小部分文本可以可靠地确定年代，这使得一些特征是方言的还是历时的存在争议；大多数资料来源都是在修道院收集的宗教文本，模糊了出处；这些有时似乎是从一种方言复制到另一种方言。

The more than 8000 manuscript fragments discovered in Western China and written down between the 9th and the 14th centuries, hundreds of inscriptions in the so-called runiform script discovered in Mongolia, South Siberia and Kirgizstan, the oldest of which date to the late 7th century, and a few Muslim Turkic texts from 11th and 12th century may perhaps be considered to belong to a single language in spite of the long period and the huge area covered. The project plans to survey this corpus in order to discover the phonic, morphological and lexical features which can lead to the assignment of the texts to dialects. Only a small minority of the texts can be reliably dated, making it debatable whether some features are dialectological or diachronic; most of the sources are religious texts brought together in monasteries, blurring provenance; these sometimes seem to have been copied from one dialect into another.