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The Kipchak languages (also known as the Kypchak, Qypchaq, Qypshaq or the Northwestern Turkic languages) are a sub-branch of the Turkic language family spoken by approximately 30 million people in much of Central Asia and Eastern Europe, spanning from Ukraine to China.
The Kipchaks or Qipchaks, also known as Kipchak Turks or Polovtsians, were Turkic nomads and then a confederation that existed in the Middle Ages inhabiting parts of the Eurasian Steppe.
The Kipchak spoke a Turkic language whose most important surviving record is the Codex Cumanicus, a late 13th-century dictionary of words in Kipchak, Latin, and Persian.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Cuman or Kuman (also called Kipchak, Qypchaq or Polovtsian, self referred to as Tatar (tatar til) in Codex Cumanicus) was a West Kipchak Turkic language spoken by the Cumans (Polovtsy, Folban, Vallany, Kun) and Kipchaks; the language was similar to today's various languages of the West Kipchak branch.
The Kipchak languages offer a fascinating lens into the rich tapestry of Turkic history, culture, and migration. Whether it’s the lyrical beauty of a Kazakh song or the profound wisdom of a Kyrgyz proverb, the influence of the Kipchak world continues to resonate across Eurasia.
The Northwestern (Kipchak) branch of Turkic is characterized by typical Turkic phonological, morphological, and syntactic features and thus serves as a good illustration of the “Turkic type” (Johanson and Csató, 1998; Johanson, forthcoming).
From the second half of the 13th century, Kipchak became a language of everyday use within the Golden Horde, even though official documents were written in Mongolian. The main source for the Kipchak language, the Codex Cumanicus written in the 14th century, used two names for the Kipchak language.
