Turkoman (ethnonym)

Turkoman, also known as Turcoman (English: /ˈtɜːrkəmən/), was a term for the people of Oghuz Turkic origin, widely used during the Middle Ages. Oghuz Turks were a western Turkic people that, in the 8th century A.D, formed a tribal confederation in an area between the Aral and Caspian seas in Central Asia, and spoke the Oghuz branch of the Turkic language family. Today, much of the populations of Turkey, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan are direct descendants of Oghuz Turks once called Turkomans.

Turkmen, originally an exonym, dates from the High Middle Ages, along with the ancient and familiar name "Turk" (türk), and tribal names such as "Bayat", "Bayandur", "Afshar", and "Kayi". By the 10th century, Islamic sources were referring to Oghuz Turks as Muslim Turkmens, as opposed to Tengrist or Buddhist Turks. It entered into the usage of the Western world through the Byzantines in the 12th century, since by that time Oghuz Turks were overwhelmingly Muslim. Later, the term "Oghuz" was gradually supplanted by "Turkmen" among Oghuz Turks themselves, thus turning an exonym into an endonym, a process which was completed by the beginning of the 13th century.

In Anatolia, since the Late Middle Ages, "Turkmen" was superseded by the term "Ottoman", which came from the name of the Ottoman Empire and its ruling dynasty. It remains as an endonym of the semi-nomadic tribes of the Terekeme, a sub-ethnic group of the Azerbaijani people.

Today, a significant percentage of residents of Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan are descendants of Oghuz Turks (Turkmens), and the languages they speak belong to the Oghuz group of the Turkic language family. As of the early 21st century, this ethnonym is still used by the Turkmens of Central Asia, the main population of Turkmenistan, who have sizeable groups in Iran, Afghanistan and Russia, as well as Iraqi and Syrian Turkmens, the other descendants of Oghuz Turks.

The current majority view for the etymology of the ethnonym Türkmen or Turcoman is that it comes from Türk and the Turkic emphatic suffix -men, meaning 'most Turkic of the Turks' or 'pure-blooded Turks'. A folk etymology, dating back to the Middle Ages and found in al-Biruni and Mahmud al-Kashgari, instead derives the suffix -men from the Persian suffix -mānind, with the resulting word meaning 'like a Turk'. While formerly the dominant etymology in modern scholarship, this mixed Turkic-Persian derivation is now viewed as incorrect.

The first-known mention of the term "Turkmen", "Turkman" or "Turkoman" occurs near the end of the 10th century A.D in Islamic literature by the Arab geographer al-Muqaddasi in Ahsan Al-Taqasim Fi Ma'rifat Al-Aqalim. In his work, which was completed in 987 A.D, al-Muqaddasi writes about Turkmens twice while depicting the region as the frontier of the Muslim possessions in Central Asia. According to medieval Islamic authors Al-Biruni and al-Marwazi, the term Turkmen referred to the Oghuz who converted to Islam. There is evidence, however, that non-Oghuz Turks such as Karluks also have been called Turkomans and Turkmens; Kafesoğlu (1958) proposes that Türkmen might be the Karluks' equivalent of the Göktürks' political term Kök Türk. Later during the Middle Ages, the term was extensively employed for Oghuz Turks, a western Turkic people, who established a large tribal confederation called Oghuz Yabgu in the 8th century A.D. This polity, whose inhabitants spoke Oghuz Turkic, occupied an area between the Aral and Caspian seas in Central Asia.

The Seljuqs appeared in the beginning of the 11th century in Mawarannahr. Muslim Oghuz people, generally identified as Turkmens by then, rallied around the Qinik tribe that made up the core of the future Seljuq tribal union and the state they would create in the 11th century.

Since the Seljuk era, the sultans of the dynasty created military settlements in parts of the Near and Middle East to strengthen their power; large Turkmen settlements were created in Syria, Iraq, and Eastern Anatolia. After the Battle of Manzikert, the Oghuz extensively settled throughout Anatolia and Azerbaijan. In the 11th century, Turkmens densely populated Arran. The 12th-century Persian writer al-Marwazi wrote about the arrival of Turkmens to Muslim lands, portraying them as people of noble character who are strong and persistent in battle because of their nomadic lifestyle, and calling them sultans (rulers).