I would like to conduct a study of morphology variations across Turkey and even in nearby countries with languages in the Turkish language family, especially Azerbaijan. In order to this, I would like to ideally travel across through all of Turkey, all the way to Azerbaijan, and collect sound clips and written phonological notes of how people say the same set of standard sentences, as well as recording general conversations for varieties the standard sentences will not be able to cover.
Turkish, like any language, has many morphemes. Because Turkish is an agglutinative language, needing suffixes and adding suffixes on top of those suffixes to give meaning, it has a huge dependency on derivational morphemes. I would like to investigate how these morphological structures differ in pronunciation and placement in different regions of Turkey, this includes any possible differences in free variation as well. I would also like to see if the agglutinative qualities of Turkish is lower in certain regions of the country. Perhaps these communities have their own unique organizational patterns or they have more influence from non-agglutinative languages.
Azerbaijani is a very interesting language in that it is from the same language family as Turkish and is very similar to Turkish in many ways but is also under heavy influence from its own unique language and Persian. Their inflectional morphology varies a lot with mainland Turkish, with some Azeri dialects using similar suffixes to that of mainland Turkish whereas some suffixes differ. An example I found is of ‘geliyorum’ (I am coming) in Turkish becoming ‘geliyerem’ in some Azeri dialects, with the vowels and pronunciation of the inflectional morpheme suffixes (-um in Turkish and -em in Azeri) changing.
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