This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 13th International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, held 16-20 August 2006 and convened by Eva A. Csato. The Uppsala meeting continued a significant tradition of gatherings held biannually since 1982. The selected papers deal with different fields of linguistic studies including discourse, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, semantics, lexicology, word formation, syntax, dialectology, language acquisition, second language learning, bilingualism, language contact, historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, contrastive studies, and Turkish Sign Language. The language studied in most papers is Turkish, but other Turkic languages such as Azeri, Kazakh, and Modern Uyghur are also represented. An introductory report gives a comprehensive account of the wide range of contributions presented at the conference. An overview of the Turkic language family accompanied by a map provides a first orientation even for readers not familiar with Turkic.