This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Volga Türki" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(July 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

TheVolga Turki language was a literary language used by some ethnic groups of theVolga-Ural region (Tatars andBashkirs) from theMiddle Ages until the 19th century.

Volga Turki is a member of theKipchak (or Northwestern) group ofTurkic languages, although it is partly derived from the ancientBulgar language (the first poem, considered to be written byQul Ghali in Volga Turki dates back toVolga Bulgaria's epoch). It included manyPersian andArabic loans.

In its written form the language was spelled uniformly among different ethnic groups, speaking different Turkic languages of the Kipchak group, but pronunciation differed from one people to another, approximating to the spoken language, making this written form universal for different languages. The main reason for this universal usage was that the principal differences between the languages of the Kipchak group are in the pronunciation of the vowels, which was not adequately represented by theArabic script.

The language formerly used theArabic script and later its variantİske imlâ. The Volga Turki language is a language ofIdel-Ural poetry and literature. With theOttoman Turkish,Azeri,Kipchak,^[1]Khaqani Turkic^[2] andChagatai, they were the only Turkic literary languages used in the Middle Ages. It was actively used in publishing until 1905, when the first Tatar and Bashkir newspaper started being published in modernTatar andBashkir language, which until then had been used only in a spoken form.

• "Eski Başqurt Əzəbiy Tili/Иҫке башҡорт әҙәби теле".Tatar Encyclopaedia (in Tatar).Kazan: TheRepublic of Tatarstan Academy of Sciences. Institution of the Tatar Encyclopaedia. 2002.

• Turki
• Bashkir language
• Tatar language

• Agglutinative languages
• Turkic languages
• Tatar language
• Extinct languages of Europe
• Kipchak languages

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles needing additional references from July 2024
• All articles needing additional references
• Articles containing uncoded-language text
• Historical forms of languages with ISO codes
• Language articles with unreferenced extinction date
• Language articles missing Glottolog code
• Articles containing Bashkir-language text
• CS1 Tatar-language sources (tt)