A prominent Turkic scholar,
Mahmud Kashgari, also mentions the etymology
Türk manand (like Turks). The language and ethnicity of the Turkmen were much influenced by their migration to the west. Kashgari calls the Karluks Turkmen as well, but the first time the etymology Turkmen was used was by
Makdisi in the second half of the 10th century AD. Like Kashgari, he wrote that the Karluks and
Oghuz Turks were called Turkmen. Some modern scholars have proposed that the element
-man/-men acts as an intensifier, and have translated the word as "pure Turk" or "most Turk-like of the Turks".
[9] Among Muslim chroniclers such as
Ibn Kathir, the etymology was attributed to the mass conversion of two hundred thousand households in 971 AD, causing them to be named
Turk Iman, which is a combination of "Turk" and "Iman" إيمان (faith, belief), meaning "believing Turks", with the term later dropping the hard-to-pronounce
hamza.
[10]
Historically, all of the Western or
Oghuz Turks have been called
Türkmen or
Turkoman;
[11] however, today the terms are usually restricted to two Turkic groups: the Turkmen people of
Turkmenistan and adjacent parts of
Central Asia, and the
Turkomans of Iraq and
Syria.