Bashkir (, ; Bashkir: ''Bashqortsa'', ''Bashqort tele'', ) is a
Turkic language belonging to the
Kipchak branch. It is co-official with
Russian in
Bashkortostan
The Republic of Bashkortostan or Bashkortostan ( ba, Башҡортостан Республикаһы, Bashqortostan Respublikahy; russian: Республика Башкортостан, Respublika Bashkortostan),; russian: Респу́блик� ...
. It is spoken by approximately 1.4 million native speakers in Russia, as well as in
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inva ...
,
Belarus
Belarus,, , ; alternatively and formerly known as Byelorussia (from Russian ). officially the Republic of Belarus,; rus, Республика Беларусь, Respublika Belarus. is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by ...
,
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbeki ...
,
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan (, ; uz, Ozbekiston, italic=yes / , ; russian: Узбекистан), officially the Republic of Uzbekistan ( uz, Ozbekiston Respublikasi, italic=yes / ; russian: Республика Узбекистан), is a doubly landlocked co ...
,
Estonia
Estonia, formally the Republic of Estonia, is a country by the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, an ...
and other neighboring
post-Soviet states
The post-Soviet states, also known as the former Soviet Union (FSU), the former Soviet Republics and in Russia as the near abroad (russian: links=no, ближнее зарубежье, blizhneye zarubezhye), are the 15 sovereign states that wer ...
, and among the
Bashkir diaspora. It has three
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is ...
groups: Southern, Eastern and Northwestern.
Speakers
Speakers of Bashkir mostly live in the republic of
Bashkortostan
The Republic of Bashkortostan or Bashkortostan ( ba, Башҡортостан Республикаһы, Bashqortostan Respublikahy; russian: Республика Башкортостан, Respublika Bashkortostan),; russian: Респу́блик� ...
(a republic within the Russian Federation). Many speakers also live in
Tatarstan,
Chelyabinsk
Chelyabinsk ( rus, Челя́бинск, p=tɕɪˈlʲæbʲɪnsk, a=Ru-Chelyabinsk.ogg; ba, Силәбе, ''Siläbe'') is the administrative center and largest city of Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. It is the seventh-largest city in Russia, with a ...
,
Orenburg,
Tyumen,
Sverdlovsk and
Kurgan Oblasts and other regions of
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-ei ...
. Minor Bashkir groups also live in
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbeki ...
and other countries.
Classification
Bashkir together with
Tatar
The Tatars ()[Tatar]
in the Collins English Dictionary is an umbrella term for different belongs to the Bulgaric (russian: кыпчакско-булгарская) subgroups of the
Kipchak languages. They share the same vocalism and the vowel shifts (see
below
Below may refer to:
*Earth
* Ground (disambiguation)
*Soil
*Floor
* Bottom (disambiguation)
*Less than
*Temperatures below freezing
*Hell or underworld
People with the surname
*Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general
*Fred Below ...
) that make both languages stand apart from most other Kipchak and
Oghuz Turkic languages.
However, Bashkir differs from Tatar in several important ways:
* Bashkir has dental fricatives and in the place of Tatar (and other Turkic) and . Bashkir and , however, cannot begin a word (there are exceptions: ҙур ''dhur'' 'big', and the particle/conjunction ҙа/ҙә ''dha/dhä''). The only other Turkic language with a similar feature is
Turkmen. However, in Bashkir and are two independent phonemes, distinct from and , whereas in Turkmen
�and
�are the two main
realizations of the common Turkic and . In other words, there are no and phonemes in Turkmen, unlike Bashkir which has both and and and .
* The word-initial and morpheme-initial is turned into . An example of both features can be Tatar сүз ''süz'' and Bashkir һүҙ ''hüź'' , both meaning "word".
* Common Turkic (Tatar ) is turned into Bashkir , e.g., Turkish ''ağaç'' , Tatar агач ''aghach'' and Bashkir ағас ''aghas'' , all meaning "tree".
* The word-initial in Tatar always corresponds to in Standard Bashkir, e.g., Tatar җылы ''zhïlï'' and Bashkir йылы ''yïly'' , both meaning "warm". However, the eastern and northern dialects of Bashkir have the > /~/ shift.
The Bashkir orthography is more explicit. and are written with their own letters Ҡ ҡ and Ғ ғ, whereas in Tatar they are treated as positional allophones of and , written К к and Г г.
Labial
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, me ...
in Bashkir is written explicitly, e.g. Tatar тормышым ''tormïshïm'' and Bashkir тормошом ''tormoshom'', both pronounced , meaning "my life".
Orthography
After the adoption of
Islam
Islam (; ar, ۘالِإسلَام, , ) is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion centred primarily around the Quran, a religious text considered by Muslims to be the direct word of God (or '' Allah'') as it was revealed to Muhammad, the ...
, which
began in the 10th century and lasted for several centuries, the Bashkirs began to use
Turki
Chagatai (چغتای, ''Čaġatāy''), also known as ''Turki'', Eastern Turkic, or Chagatai Turkic (''Čaġatāy türkīsi''), is an extinct Turkic literary language that was once widely spoken across Central Asia and remained the shared literar ...
as a written language. Turki was written in a variant of the
Arabic script
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and th ...
.
In 1923, a writing system based on the
Arabic script
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and th ...
was specifically created for the Bashkir language. At the same time, the Bashkir literary language was created, moving away from the older written Turkic influences. At first, it used a modified Arabic
alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
. In 1930 it was replaced with the
Unified Turkic Latin Alphabet, which was in turn replaced with an adapted
Cyrillic
The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...
alphabet in 1939.
The modern alphabet used by Bashkir is based on the
Russian alphabet, with the addition of the following letters:
Ә ә ,
Ө ө ,
Ү ү ,
Ғ ғ ,
Ҡ ҡ ,
Ң ң ,
Ҙ ҙ ,
Ҫ ҫ ,
Һ һ .
Phonology
Vowels
Bashkir has nine native vowels, and three or four loaned vowels (mainly in Russian loanwords).
Phonetically, the native vowels are approximately thus (with the Cyrillic letter followed by the usual Latin romanization in angle brackets):
In Russian loans there are also , , and , written the same as the native vowels: ы, е/э, о, а respectively.
The mid vowels may be transcribed as lowered near-high
, , and the
close front or
close central rounded vowel
may be transcribed as
near-close near-front [].
Historical shifts
Historically, the Old Turkic mid vowels have Raising (phonetics), raised from mid to high, whereas the Old Turkic high vowels have become the Bashkir reduced mid series. (The same shifts have also happened in
Tatar
The Tatars ()[Tatar]
in the Collins English Dictionary is an umbrella term for different .)
Consonants
;Notes
: The phonemes , , , , , , are found only in loanwords, and, in the case of , in a few native onomatopoeic words.
* are dental , and is apical alveolar . The exact place of articulation of the other dental/alveolar consonants is unclear.
Grammar
A member of the
Turkic language family, Bashkir is an
agglutinative
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative l ...
,
SOV language.
A large part of the Bashkir vocabulary has Turkic roots; and there are many loan words in Bashkir from
Russian,
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
and
Persian sources.
Declension of nouns
Declension of pronouns
References
Further reading
*
*
*
External links
National Corpus of the Bashkir languageMachine fund of the Bashkir languageSpoken corpus of Bashkir (Rakhmetovo and Baimovo)
Short grammar of Bashkir
{{Authority control
Agglutinative languages
Subject–object–verb languages
Kipchak languages
Languages of Kazakhstan
Languages of Russia
Turkic languages
Vowel-harmony languages
Languages written in Cyrillic script