Old Turkic titles

The word tekin leads two separate lives in Turkish. In the Orkhon inscriptions, spelled tegin, it means the son of the khagan, a prince; the name Kül Tigin carries this title. In everyday modern Turkish the word mostly survives in a negative phrase: a place that is tekin değil is uncanny, a place you do not trust. Whether these are two branches of one word or two words that happen to sound alike is not settled. No dictionary can tell you which one a family had in mind with the surname Tekin.

Titles of the steppe

The surnames on this page come from the title vocabulary of the old Turkic states. The highest is kağan, the title of an independent ruler of the steppe. Over time the word wore down: Ottoman Turkish has hakan, and the modern spelling Kaan is now common. Whether kağan itself was borrowed from an older steppe language is debated. Han belongs to the same family; it is generally taken as a shortened form of kağan and means ‘ruler’. Watch out for a trap here. Persian han means ‘caravanserai, commercial building’ and has nothing to do with the title.

Tarhan was a high rank in the early Turkic states, and sources describe its holders as enjoying certain privileges. The word is usually thought to be a loan, but its source language is debated. İnal is also a title; early sources and modern scholars explain it differently, and its exact meaning remains debated. Bey goes back to Old Turkic beg ‘chief, lord’. Its ultimate origin is debated as well: one view links it to an Iranian word for ‘lord’, another to a Chinese title.

Forms, and the year 1934

These words enter surnames in three ways. The first is the bare word: Han, Tekin, Bey. The second is -oğlu: Tekinoğlu, Hanoğlu. The third is the compound given name, such as Erhan, Gökhan and Alptekin. Because the title is the second element there, this site covers those names under Turkic name elements.

The titles abolished by Law No. 2590 on 26 November 1934 include bey. Han, tekin, kağan and tarhan are not on that list. Article 5 of the Surname Regulation, for its part, took as its principle that new surnames be drawn from the Turkish language. Some of these words later spread as given names too: Hakan and Kaan are familiar boys' names today.

In the figures, Tekin stands out. According to TÜİK ADNKS 2025, Tekin is the 20th most common surname in Denizli province (3,220 people).

A final note. A title inside a surname does not show that a family is linked to a dynasty or a noble clan. What these surnames do show is that words once carved in stone on the Orkhon steles are still in use. That is all, and it is quite a lot.