As the extant corpus of Khazar is extremely limited, consisting of two nouns, a conjugated verb, and a few proper names, its exact genealogical position within the Turkic phylum remains unresolved.

[1] The Khazar realm was a polyglot (multilingual) and polyethnic (multicultural) state, with Iranian, Finnic, Ugric, Slavic, and North Caucasian languages.

[2] According to anthropological data, it was ruled by Inner Asian Mongoloid (with some Europoid somatic elements) core tribes that accompanied the dynasty.

[8][9] Compared to the uniformity of Common Turkic, which Al-Istakhri mentioned "as for the Turks, all of them, from the Toquz Oghuz, Qirgiz, Kimek, Oguz, Qarluq, their language is one.

The Arab historian Ibn A'tham al-Kufi records the name of a type of tent as alǰdāḏ, whose first part is probably a cognate of eastern Old Turkic alaču 'tent'.

[15] Khazar was stated by the 1986 Guinness Book of Records (following a claim by the Great Soviet Encyclopedia) to have the "smallest literature" of any language, allegedly comprising only one attested word, oqurüm, "I have read" (from the Kievan Letter).