A Typological Contrastive Study of Greenbergian Universals in Turkish Dialects of Razan, Tabriz and Istambul

This paper aims at investigating and analyzing the coverage of Greenbergian universals in word order and inflectional categories within Razan, Tabriz and Istanbuli dialects of Turkish. The selected Iranian Turkish varieties are located in the western and northwestern regions of Iran and Istanbuli Turkish is placed in Turkey. To achieve the research goals, the data gathering has been performed via interview, voice recording and transcription. In continue, all the 45 Greenbergian universals have been examined on the selected data. In spite of their geographical distances, the research results demonstrate syntactic, morphological and typological similarities among the three varieties under consideration; although some differences are observed and notified therein, the most important one in the lexicon part. The data analysis illustrates the application of 18 universals within the data, among which around 40 percent are confirmed; although the percentage varies in syntactic, morphological and typological areas, which is demonstrated within the paper.