It is said that Polish speakers and can communicate with the speakers of the Bulgarian language to some extent. A similar situation exists between  Italian-Romanian, German-Yiddish etc. Is there indeed mutual intelligibility among Turkic languages. There is a panturanist movement that tends to exagerate similarities. According to them, all Turkic languages are just the dialects of the same protolanguage. 

To prove how true this assumption is I listened to speeches and songs in as many Turkic languages as I could. Here are the results.

Azeri Language:

This one is probably the easiest to understand for a Turkish speaker. You can almost completely follow all the dialogues. There are differences in vocabulary but most of the time, they either use a similar, archaic or less prefered version that exists in the extended vocabulary. There are some loan words from Russian many of which can still be understood. Once you realize that the Russian word for car is "mashina" and that many English loan words are to be pronounced the Russian way, many of your problems in this language disappear. Azeri language sounds a bit funny to a Turk since there are differences in vocabulary occasionally giving the sentence a weird meaning.  In the Azeri language, they say "denize düþtüm" when they want to say I took a sea bath. In Turkish however, the exact  same sentence means I fell into the sea. Similarly, they use "fell" to describe the landing of a plane which translates into Turkish as the plane has crashed. Not good news, when you hear this at the airport expecting to meet your friends or relatives coming by plane. There are so many other sentences producing wild translations. If an Azeri person drinks soup in a Turkish restaurant and complains of "sümük" in the soup, the waiters and the restaurant owners may find themselves in a miserable situation since sümük in Turkish means mucus whereas in Azeri it only means bone. If you ask for a bardak at an Azeri restaurant the waiter might be very offended. Bardak in Azeri means woman whereas it means glass in Turkish.

Uzbek Language:

I listened to a clip featuring a prominent linguist raving about the charactersitics about the Uzbek language. The intonation was unmistakably Turkish so were most speech sounds. He spoke slowly and in a clear manner which probably made it easy for me to understand 80% of the monologue.  When listening you´d find there are strings of words which are exactly the same in Turkish and when the going is like that then comes the anticlimax, there are other strings of words which make you think you are listening to a Turkish speech and that you are unable to understand your own language. The linguist was talking about the current state of the Uzbek language, the loan words from Arabic, Persian and Russian and the efforts to base the tokening of new words on the internal resources of the language. He went on to say something which I also support: prescriptive approaches are doomed to fail. We must rely on social dynamics that give shape to language. In other words, people´s preferences must be the main channel by which a language develops. 

Uzbek songs, especially fast ones are not very easy to understand. Sometimes, you listen to a phrase which is completely meaningful in Turkish but you can not understand it at first blush. These sentences are gramattically correct but semantically wrong in the Turkish language.

Tatar Language

I listened to a poem read by a female Crimean Tatar.  This language is unbelievably close to modern day Turkish. The main difference between the two languages is the presence of a few different suffixes which seem to be quite easy to learn. The intonation is slightly different. Sounds a bit under Russian influence but I may be wrong. The basic vocabulary is almost the same however there are certain words only used in the Tatar language. On the whole we can talk about very good mutual intelligibility.

To be continued...