Bashkir language

Bashkir ( , ) or Bashkort (, ) is a Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak branch. It is co-official with Russian in Bashkortostan. Bashkir has approximately 750,000 native speakers. It has two dialect groups: Southern and Eastern. Bashkir has native speakers in Russia, as well as in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Estonia and other neighboring post-Soviet states, and among the Bashkir diaspora.

Speakers

Speakers of Bashkir mostly live in the republic of Bashkortostan (a republic within the Russian Federation). Many speakers also live in Tatarstan, Chelyabinsk, Orenburg, Tyumen, Sverdlovsk and Kurgan Oblasts and other regions of Russia. Minor Bashkir groups also live in Kazakhstan and the United States.

In a recent local media report in Bashkortostan, it was reported that some officials of the republic cannot assemble a document in Bashkir language.

Classification

Bashkir together with Tatar belongs to the Kipchak-Bulgar () subgroup of the Kipchak languages. These languages have a similar vocabulary by 94.9%, and they not only have common origin, but also a common ancestor in the written language — Volga Turki.
However, Bashkir differs from Tatar in several important ways:
* Bashkir has dental fricatives and in the place of Turkic , , and . For example, Turkish and Bashkir (), Turkish and Bashkir (), Turkish and Bashkir (), or Turkish and Bashkir (). Bashkir and , however, cannot begin a word (there are exceptions: () , and the particle/conjunction () or () . 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 () and Bashkir (), both meaning "word".
* Common Turkic (Tatar ) is turned into Bashkir , e.g., Turkish , Tatar () and Bashkir () , all meaning "tree".
* The word-initial in Tatar always corresponds to in Standard Bashkir, e.g., Tatar () and Bashkir () , 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 Bashkir is written explicitly, e.g., Tatar () and Bashkir (, both pronounced , meaning "my life".

Sample text

Orthography

After the adoption of Islam, which began in the 10th century and lasted for several centuries, the Bashkirs began to use Turki as a written language. Turki was written in a variant of the Arabic script.

In 1923, a writing system based on the Arabic script 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. In 1930 it was replaced with the Unified Turkic Latin Alphabet, which was in turn replaced with an adapted Cyrillic 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 .

Bashkir Latin alphabet based on the Common Turkic alphabet

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.

Historical shifts

Historically, the Proto-Turkic mid vowels have raised from mid to high, whereas the Proto-Turkic high vowels have become the Bashkir reduced mid series. (The same shifts have also happened in Tatar.) However, in most dialects of Bashkir, this shift is not as prominent as in Tatar.

Consonants

;Notes
: The phonemes , , are found only in loanwords, and, in the case of , in a few native onomatopoeic words.
: is an intervocal allophone of , and it is distinct from . is an allophone of in back vowel contexts. and occur as allophones of and before , and both occur only in front vowel contexts.
* 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, SOV language. A large part of the Bashkir vocabulary has Turkic roots; and there are many loan words in Bashkir from Russian, Arabic and Persian sources.

Plurality

The form of the plural suffix is heavily dependent on the letter which comes immediately before it. When it's a consonant, there is a four-way distinction between "л" (l), "т" (t), "ҙ" (ź) and "д" (d); The vowel's distinction is two-way between "а" (after back vowels "а" (a), "ы" (ı), "о" (o), "у" (u)) and "ә" (after front vowels "ә" (ə), "е" (e), "и" (i), "ө" (ö), "ү" (ü)). Some nouns are also less likely to be used with their plural forms such as "һыу" (hıw, "water") or "ҡом" (qom, "sand").

Declension table

See also

* Bashkir alphabet
* Bashkir–Russian code-switching

References

Further reading

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External links

National Corpus of the Bashkir language

Machine 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
Indigenous languages of European Russia
Turkic languages
Vowel-harmony languages
Languages written in Cyrillic script
Vulnerable languages