Abstract:

There are hundreds of scientific studies about Old Anatolian Turkish which is the first period of historical Oghuz language and its texts, in Turkology of Turkey. On the literature of these studies this period has been examined in the light of changing perspectives. Previously, it was thought that it had already been arised from the writing language of Karakhanid, but now it has become almost clear that the Oghuzes always have a spoken language, even languages, beginning to be written in the 13th century. Until now, the reasons of the language situation which appeared in the opuses of the first period and which showed mainly bidialectic features but became widespread as 'mixed language' in Turkology literature have been evaluated differently. Despite such differences in views and evaluations, the almost unchanging view to date is that Old Anatolian Turkish is a writing language. Until today, the results of the researches carried out on Old Anatolian Turkish reveal that the language of this period does not have the standards in terms of phonetics, morphology and spelling. So, even in different lines or strings on the same page of the same text, the use of this non-standard language and spelling is often visible. These multi-characterized language features, which are rarely seen in other historical periods of the Turkish language, quite separates this period known as Old Anatolian Turkish from other Turkic written languages. In this article, after the concepts and phenomena such as 'written language', 'standard language', 'literary language' and 'writing language' determined by general linguistics were discussed, the sociological, political and military conditions and situation of Old Anatolian Turkish period were evaluated and the language situation of this first period between the 13th-15th centuries and whether the language of that period is written or not is questioned and discussed.

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