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Sakha, or Yakut, is a Turkic language
Turkic languages

The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean Sea to Siberia and Western China, and are sometimes considered to be part of the proposed Altaic languages....
 with around 460,000 speakers spoken in the Sakha Republic
Sakha Republic

The Sakha Republic is a federal subjects of Russia of Russia . At half the size of the Far Eastern Federal District, it is the list of the largest country subdivisions by area in the world at 3,100,000 km? with a population of less than one million....
 in the Russian Federation by the Sakha
Yakuts

Yakuts, self-designation: Sakha, are a Turkic people people associated with the Sakha Republic.The Yakut language belongs to the Northern branch of the Turkic Languages....
 or Yakuts
Yakuts

Yakuts, self-designation: Sakha, are a Turkic people people associated with the Sakha Republic.The Yakut language belongs to the Northern branch of the Turkic Languages....
.

a is a member of the Northern Turkic family of languages, which includes Shor
Shor language

The Shor language is one of the Turkic languages. It is spoken by around 10,000 people in the Kemerovo Oblast in south-central Siberia. Not all ethnic Shors speak Shor, and the language witnessed a decline from the late 1930s to the early 1990s....
, Tuvan
Tuvan language

Tuvan , also known as Tuvinian, Tyvan, or Tuvin, is one of the Turkic languages. It is spoken by around 200,000 people in the Republic of Tuva in south-central Siberia in Russia....
, and Dolgan
Dolgan language

The Dolgan language is a Turkic languages with around 5,000 speakers, spoken in the Taymyr Peninsula in Russia. Its speakers are known as the Dolgans....
 in addition to Sakha. The Northern Turkic family is a subgroup of the Turkic languages
Turkic languages

The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean Sea to Siberia and Western China, and are sometimes considered to be part of the proposed Altaic languages....
, which some linguists believe to be member of the disputed Altaic language family
Altaic languages

Altaic is a disputed language family that is generally held by its proponents to include the Turkic languages, Mongolic languages, Tungusic languages, Korean language, and Japonic languages language families ....
.

Like Finnish, Hungarian
Hungarian language

Hungarian is a Uralic languages unrelated to most other languages in Europe. It is mainly spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in the seven neighbouring countries....
, and Turkish
Turkish language

Turkish is a language spoken by over 63 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Cyprus, with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania and other parts of Eastern Europe....
, Sakha has vowel harmony
Vowel harmony

Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance Assimilation Phonology process involving vowels in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on what vowels may be found near each other....
, is agglutinative
Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphology point of view....
 and has no grammatical gender
Grammatical gender

In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once....
.






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Sakha, or Yakut, is a Turkic language
Turkic languages

The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean Sea to Siberia and Western China, and are sometimes considered to be part of the proposed Altaic languages....
 with around 460,000 speakers spoken in the Sakha Republic
Sakha Republic

The Sakha Republic is a federal subjects of Russia of Russia . At half the size of the Far Eastern Federal District, it is the list of the largest country subdivisions by area in the world at 3,100,000 km? with a population of less than one million....
 in the Russian Federation by the Sakha
Yakuts

Yakuts, self-designation: Sakha, are a Turkic people people associated with the Sakha Republic.The Yakut language belongs to the Northern branch of the Turkic Languages....
 or Yakuts
Yakuts

Yakuts, self-designation: Sakha, are a Turkic people people associated with the Sakha Republic.The Yakut language belongs to the Northern branch of the Turkic Languages....
.

Classification

Sakha is a member of the Northern Turkic family of languages, which includes Shor
Shor language

The Shor language is one of the Turkic languages. It is spoken by around 10,000 people in the Kemerovo Oblast in south-central Siberia. Not all ethnic Shors speak Shor, and the language witnessed a decline from the late 1930s to the early 1990s....
, Tuvan
Tuvan language

Tuvan , also known as Tuvinian, Tyvan, or Tuvin, is one of the Turkic languages. It is spoken by around 200,000 people in the Republic of Tuva in south-central Siberia in Russia....
, and Dolgan
Dolgan language

The Dolgan language is a Turkic languages with around 5,000 speakers, spoken in the Taymyr Peninsula in Russia. Its speakers are known as the Dolgans....
 in addition to Sakha. The Northern Turkic family is a subgroup of the Turkic languages
Turkic languages

The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean Sea to Siberia and Western China, and are sometimes considered to be part of the proposed Altaic languages....
, which some linguists believe to be member of the disputed Altaic language family
Altaic languages

Altaic is a disputed language family that is generally held by its proponents to include the Turkic languages, Mongolic languages, Tungusic languages, Korean language, and Japonic languages language families ....
.

Like Finnish, Hungarian
Hungarian language

Hungarian is a Uralic languages unrelated to most other languages in Europe. It is mainly spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in the seven neighbouring countries....
, and Turkish
Turkish language

Turkish is a language spoken by over 63 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Cyprus, with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania and other parts of Eastern Europe....
, Sakha has vowel harmony
Vowel harmony

Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance Assimilation Phonology process involving vowels in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on what vowels may be found near each other....
, is agglutinative
Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphology point of view....
 and has no grammatical gender
Grammatical gender

In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once....
. Word order is usually Subject Object Verb
Subject Object Verb

In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb is the type of languages in which the subject , object , and verb of a sentence appear or usually appear in that order....
.

Geographic distribution

Sakha is spoken mainly in the Sakha Republic
Sakha Republic

The Sakha Republic is a federal subjects of Russia of Russia . At half the size of the Far Eastern Federal District, it is the list of the largest country subdivisions by area in the world at 3,100,000 km? with a population of less than one million....
. It is also used by ethnic Sakha in Khabarovsk Region and a small diaspora in other parts of the Russian Federation, Turkey
Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country that stretches across the Anatolian peninsula in southwest Asia and Thrace in the Balkans region of Southern Europe....
, and other parts of the world. Dolgan
Dolgan language

The Dolgan language is a Turkic languages with around 5,000 speakers, spoken in the Taymyr Peninsula in Russia. Its speakers are known as the Dolgans....
, a close relative of Sakha, considered by some a dialect, is spoken by Dolgans
Dolgans

Dolgans are a Turkic languages-speaking people, who mostly inhabit Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. The Russian Census counted 7,261 Dolgans. This number includes 5,517 in former Taymyr Autonomous Okrug....
 in Krasnoyarsk Region. Sakha is widely used as a lingua franca
Lingua franca

A lingua franca is a language systematically used to communicate between persons not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both persons' mother tongues....
 by other ethnic minorities in the Sakha Republic
Sakha Republic

The Sakha Republic is a federal subjects of Russia of Russia . At half the size of the Far Eastern Federal District, it is the list of the largest country subdivisions by area in the world at 3,100,000 km? with a population of less than one million....
 - more Dolgans
Dolgans

Dolgans are a Turkic languages-speaking people, who mostly inhabit Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. The Russian Census counted 7,261 Dolgans. This number includes 5,517 in former Taymyr Autonomous Okrug....
, Evenks
Evenks

The Evenks or Evenki are a Tungusic people of Northern Asia. In Russia, the Evenks are recognized as one of the Indigenous peoples of the Russian North, with a population of 35,527 ....
, Evens
Evens

The Evens or Eveny are a people in Siberia and the Russian Far East. They live in some of the regions of the Magadan Oblast and Kamchatka Krai and northern parts of Sakha Republic east of the Lena River....
 and Yukagirs speak Yakut than their own languages. About 8% of the people of other ethnicities than Yakut living in Sakha claimed knowledge of Yakut language during the 2002 census.

Sounds

One characteristic feature of Sakha is vowel harmony
Vowel harmony

Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance Assimilation Phonology process involving vowels in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on what vowels may be found near each other....
. For example, if the first vowel of a Sakha word is a front vowel, the second and other vowels of the same word are usually the same vowel or another front vowel: ????? (kelin) "back": ? (e) is open unrounded front, ? (i) is close unrounded front.

Consonants


Vowels

caption| Vowel phonemes of Sakha
Short Long Diphthong
Diphthong

In phonetics, a diphthong, or , is a contour vowel?that is, a unitary vowel that changes vowel quality during its pronunciation, or "glides", with a glissando of the tongue from one articulation to another, as in the English words eye, boy, and cow. This contrasts with "pure" vowels, or monophthongs, where the tongue is held s...
CloseOpenCloseOpen
FrontUnrounded
Rounded
BackUnrounded
Rounded


Writing system


Sakha is written using the Cyrillic script
Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic alphabet is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by five Slavic languages national languages as well as non-Slavic . It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past....
: the modern Sakha alphabet, established in 1939 by the Soviet Union
Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
, consists of the usual Russian characters but with 5 additional letters: , , , , .

??????? ?????-??????

Grammar


Syntax

The typical word order can be summarized as subject
Subject (grammar)

The subject is one of the two main constituent every sentence can be divided into, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle....
 adverb
Adverb

An adverb is a part of speech. It is any word that modifies any other part of language: verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentence s and other adverbs, except for nouns; modifiers of nouns are primarily determiners and adjectives....
 - object
Object (grammar)

An object in grammar is a sentence element and part of the sentence Predicate . It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb....
 - verb
Verb

In syntax, a verb is a word that usually denotes an action , an occurrence , or a state of being . Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its grammatical tense, grammatical aspect, grammatical mood and grammatical voice....
; possessor
Possession (linguistics)

Possession, in the context of linguistics, is an asymmetric relationship between two constituents, the referent of one of which possession the referent of the other....
 - possessed
Possession (linguistics)

Possession, in the context of linguistics, is an asymmetric relationship between two constituents, the referent of one of which possession the referent of the other....
; noun
Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open class lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition....
 - adjective
Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntax role is to grammatical modifier a noun or pronoun, giving more information about the noun or pronoun's definition....
.

Nouns

Nouns have plural and singular forms. The plural is formed with the suffix /-LAr/, which may surface as [-??? (-lar)], [-??? (-ler)], [-??? (-lör)], [-??? (-lor)], [-??? (-tar)], [-??? (-ter)], [-??? (-tör)], [-??? (-tor)], [-??? (-dar)], [-??? (-der)], [-??? (-dör)], [-??? (-dor)], [-??? (-nar)], [-??? (-ner)], [-??? (-nör)], or [-??? (-nor)], depending on the preceding consonants and vowels. The plural is used only when referring to a number of things collectively, not when specifying an amount. Nouns have no gender
Grammatical gender

In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once....
, but the pronoun
Pronoun

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun with or without a Determiner , such as Wiktionary:you and Wiktionary:they in English language....
 system distinguishes between human and non-human in the third person, using ???? (kini) to refer to human beings and ?? (ol) to refer to all other things.

Pronouns

Personal pronouns in Sakha distinguish between first, second, and third persons and singular and plural number.

Singular Plural
1st ??? (min) ??h??? (bihigi)
2nd ?? (en) ?h??? (ehigi)
3rd ???? (kini) ??????? (kiniler)


Questions

Question words in Sakha remain in-situ; they do not move to the front of the sentence. Sample question words include: ???? (tuox) "what", ??? (kim) "who", ?????? (xaydax) "how", ??? (xas) "how much", ????? (xanna) "where", and ?????? (xannik) "which".

Literature


The first printing in Yakut was a part of a Nicolaas Witsen's book published in 1692 in Amsterdam
Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the Capital of the Netherlands and List of cities in the Netherlands with over 100,000 people of the Netherlands, located in the Provinces of the Netherlands of North Holland in the west of the country....
.

In 2005, Marianne Beerle-Moor, director of the Institute for Bible Translation, Russia/CIS
Institute for Bible Translation

Institute for Bible Translation, was founded in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973 by Dr. Borislav Arapovic, its main task being to publish Bibles for "non-Slavic peoples in Slavic countries." These 85 million non-Slavic ethnic groups living in the former Soviet Union - now CIS, including Russia - represent a tremendous diversity of language and reli...
, was awarded the “Civil Valour” Order for ... the translation of the New Testament
New Testament

The New Testament is the name given to the second major division of the Christianity Bible, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....
 into the Yakut language.

See also

  • Yakuts
    Yakuts

    Yakuts, self-designation: Sakha, are a Turkic people people associated with the Sakha Republic.The Yakut language belongs to the Northern branch of the Turkic Languages....
  • Sakha
    Sakha

    Sakha may refer to:*Sakha Republic, a federal subject of Russia*Sakha language, or Yakut, a Turkic language*Yakuts, also Yakuts, a Turkic people...
  • Dolgan language
    Dolgan language

    The Dolgan language is a Turkic languages with around 5,000 speakers, spoken in the Taymyr Peninsula in Russia. Its speakers are known as the Dolgans....
  • Semyon Novgorodov
    Semyon Novgorodov

    Semyon Andreyevich Novgorodov was a Yakuts politician and linguistics, the creator of a Yakut language written language....
     - the inventor of the first IPA
    International Phonetic Alphabet

    The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic....
    -based Yakut alphabet


External links


Language-related

  • - heroic poetry, fairy tales, legends, proverbs, etc.
  • - Sakha Unicode fonts and Keyboard Layouts for PC
  • - On-line Yakut-Russian, Russian-Yakut dictionary
  • - mp3's of Sakha Radio


Content in Sakha

  • - A platform to promote the Yakut Language on the web; News, Lyrics, Music, Fonts, Forum, VideoNews (in Yakut, Unicode
    Unicode

    Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
    )
  • - news and stories about and by the people of Baayaga (in Yakut)
  • - site of Yakut newspaper