World-renowned professor and Distinguished Fellow on Eurasia at the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), S. Frederick Starr, in the foreword to the recently published Makul English–Turkmen Dictionary in America, stated:
“In my opinion, the Makul Dictionary will contribute not only to diplomatic, economic, educational, and cultural relations between the United States and Turkmenistan, but also to helping our peoples truly understand one another. This is because the first step in such meaningful communication is building a language bridge, and this dictionary will serve as an important contribution to that bridge.”
Dear readers, we present to you Professor S. Frederick Starr’s complete foreword.
It is long past the time when the Turkmen language, the official language of the Republic of Turkmenistan, should have made its debut in the English speaking world. Spoken by almost seven million people in Turkmenistan itself, by more than a million in Afghanistan and another 300,000 in Iran, Turkmen for too long remained in the shadows internationally. Now, with this landmark English-Turkmen dictionary by the highly competent and energic Turkmen scholar and lawyer Dovran Orazgylyjov, the Turkmen language can take a well-deserved bow on the international stage.
The timing of its publication could not be better, for it coincides with Turkmenistan’s opening to the world and the sharp increase of its commercial, diplomatic, and cultural engagement with English speaking countries and with the many other countries that use English as a medium for interactions abroad. It comes at a time when a new generation of Turkmen are forging commercial and cultural ties with the English-speaking world and also with English speakers who want to move extend their engagement with Turkmenistan to a deeper level.
The genealogy of the Turkmen language traces back half a millennium to the Oghuz, progenitors of modern Turks and Azeris, as well as of the Turkmen people. While a rich body of oral works in Turkmen were passed down over the centuries, the emergence of a written literature in Turkmen began only in the eighteenth century. In that era Turkmen was written in an ill-fitting Arabic script, which was changed to Cyrillic after the Russian conquest of Turkmenistan in the nineteenth century. Finally, after the collapse of the USSR and the establishment of independent Turkmenistan, the Turkmen language appeared in a amodified form of Latin script used in this dictionary.
Turkmen enjoys a high degree of mutual intelligibility with modern Turkish and Azeri. All three lack grammatical gender and all follow a subject-object-verb word order. However, an even closer kinship with Turkmen is to be found in the language of Khorasan in eastern Iran and western Afghanistan and in the language of Khwarezm in western Uzbekistan. All attest to their common ancestry, in much the way as all Romance languages are seen as descendants of ancient Latin. Yet each of them has many important and even crucial singularities that arise from their specific genealogies, their varying traditions in oral and written literature, and in the fates of the peoples who speak them today. In short, all are distinct languages in the full sense of the word. This new dictionary will go far towards asserting Turkmenistan’s specific and distinct identity within that world.
While the study of Turkmen remains in its infancy in the English-speaking world, English is currently enjoying a boom in Turkmenistan, with programs of instruction at all the major universities, scores of secondary schools, and many business-oriented institutes and on-line programs. These have been assisted by several English instruction manuals and English-Turkmen dictionaries that were published around the time Turkmenistan gained its independence. However, even the best of these contained no more than 10,000 words, while Dovran Orazgylyjov’s new dictionary includes 16,000 words, many of them specific to the worlds of commerce and international affairs. The enterprising author has already announced plans for a further edition that will cover 20,000 words.
This dictionary appears at an auspicious moment: the thirty-fourth anniversary of Turkmenistan’s independence and the thirtieth anniversary of its declaration of permanent neutrality. Ashgabat now defines its neutrality in terms of balanced engagement with the wider world. This approach calls for enhanced relations with its neighbors in Greater Central Asia and other nearby powers but also with the broader world, including—significantly– the United States, Great Britain and the entire English-speaking world. Mr. Orazgylyjov’s important work, which is truly a labor of love, will greatly facilitate this important process, and will and will help all parties involved to undergird these new ties with a knowledge of each other’s language.
I believe that the Makul Dictionary will contribute not only to the diplomatic, economic, educational, and cultural relations between the United States and Turkmenistan, but also to the accurate mutual understanding of our peoples. For the first step toward such meaningful communication is the construction of a linguistic bridge, and this dictionary will serve as an important contribution to that bridge of understanding.
- Frederick Starr is the founding chairman of the Central Asia–Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program, a leading transatlantic research and policy center with offices in Washington and Stockholm. He currently serves as Distinguished Fellow for Eurasia at the American Foreign Policy Council and is a Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University–SAIS.
Dr. Starr is the author of the widely acclaimed Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (Princeton University Press, 2013), which has been translated into more than twenty languages. His follow-up volume, The Genius of Their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2023), further explores the intellectual legacy of Central Asia’s great luminaries.
A noted scholar and policy adviser, Starr has written extensively on Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the “New Silk Roads,” publishing influential works such as The Ferghana Valley: The Heart of Central Asia and The New Silk Roads. He frequently contributes to Foreign Affairs and leading international newspapers.
Beyond academia, Starr was founding chairman of the Kennan Institute, Vice President of Tulane University, and President of Oberlin College. He played a key role in establishing the University of Central Asia, the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, and serves as a trustee of Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan. Educated at Yale, Cambridge (King’s College), and Princeton (PhD in History), he holds five honorary degrees.
In addition to his scholarly work, Starr is also a founding member of the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble and has authored four books on New Orleans history and culture.