A preliminary classification of Sauzini

Sauzini which is spoken by approximately 1000 inhabitants in the Yesilova town in Kastamonu is a spoken language which has not been studied up to now. The existence of this language which has no any written materials or sources can be explained by having a closed society and their pereference of living as an isolated society that is far away from other cultures. Nevertheless having a closed society also makes to be informed about their language difficult. In this study, by making a preliminary classification of Sauzini, its placement in linguistics study and making a record about this language are aimed at. In this study, it is purposed to question the place of Sauzini by comparing it with Indo-European languages by revealing that Sauzini is an Indo-European language and make an overall linguistic outline which also includes typological classification of Sauzini. In this thesis glottostatistic and glottochronologic methods are adopted and Sauzini is compared with English which is the member of Gernmanic Laguages of Indo-European Language family, and four Iranian languages which two of them are from Northwestern and the other two are from Southwestern based on Swadesh word list. The results obtained show that Sauzini has close relation with these languages acoording to the common words furthermore it also has numerous different features according to the phonetic equvalances. It is allaged that Sauzini is a part of independent language group which sperated from West-Iranian languages in a date after Zazaki and Kurmanji but before Persian and Baḵtiāri. Key Words: Sauzini, Iranian Languages, Indo-European Language Family, Comparative Linguistics, Glottochronology, Phonetic Equvalences.