and Syria. Turkish is the 18th-most spoken language in the world. To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkish—the variety of the Turkish language that Turkish (Türkçe [ˈtyɾctʃɛ], Türk dili [ˈtyɾc dilɪ], also known as Türkiye Türkçesi 'Turkish of Turkey') is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and one of two official languages of Cyprus. Significant smaller groups of Turkish speakers also exist in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece, other parts of Turkish is a member of the Oghuz group of the Turkic family. Other members include Azerbaijani, spoken in Azerbaijan and north-west Iran, Gagauz of Gagauzia, Qashqai of south Iran, and Turkmen of Turkmenistan. Historically, the Turkic language family was considered part of the larger Altaic language family, along with the Japanese, Korean, Mongolic, and Tungusic language families. Some linguists have also proposed including other language families. Altaic theory has fallen out of favour since the 1960s, and a majority of linguists now consider Turkic languages to be unrelated to any other language family, though the Altaic hypothesis still has a small degree of support from individual linguists. The nineteenth-century Ural-Altaic theory, which grouped Turkish with Finnish, Hungarian and Altaic languages, is considered even less plausible in light of Altaic's rejection. The theory was based mostly on the fact these languages share three features: agglutination, vowel harmony and lack of grammatical gender.

Although nobody doubts today that a Ural-Altaic protolanguage is an obsolete idea there still exists some peculiar conformity between Uralic and Altaic that cannot easily be explained by simple borrowings. In this article some similarities between Turkic and Uralic pronouns are to the fore.

Although diminutives are commonly viewed as being typical of child speech and child-directed speech, their acquisition has so far neither been studied in a cross-linguistic perspective nor related to recent theoretical developments in the study of diminutives and of the associated evaluative classes of augmentatives and pejoratives (Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994, 1999 ; Jurafsky 1996). Furthermore, the development of diminutives is apt to shed light on much debated issues such as dual vs. single process models of morphological acquisition (Bybee 1995, Clahsen 1999), the role of bootstrapping (Weissenborn & Höhle 2001) and item-based vs. across-the-board learning of morphological regularities (Tomasello 2003). The present paper is based on extensive longitudinal child data from typologically different languages collected on a weekly basis and transcribed and morphologically coded according to the CHILDES Project within the Crosslinguistic Project in Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition. The main languages to be considered in this paper are Croatian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and Turkish (there will also be references to other project languages). For some of these languages, the acquisition of diminutives has been studied for the very first time here. In most languages, diminutive formation is the first word formation pattern to emerge. The main reason for this seems to be the primary pragmatic functions of endearment, empathy, and sympathy, which ma