Tatar language
The Tatar language is a
Turkic language spoken by the
Tatars. Some linguists believe that Turkic is a member of the hypothetical Altaic language family.
Encyclopedia
The Tatar language is a
Turkic language spoken by the
Tatars. Some linguists believe that Turkic is a member of the hypothetical Altaic language family.
Classification
Tatar is a
Turkic language, which is considered part of the disputed Altaic language family.
Other European ,
Caucasian and West-Siberian Turco-Tatar languages are quite similar to Kazan Tatar, but not necessarily mutually intelligible with it.
Geographic distribution
Tatar is spoken in some parts of
Europe,
Russia,
Siberia,
China,
Turkey,
Poland,
Ukraine,
Finland,
Estonia and
Central Asia.
Kazan Tatar is also native for 400,000
Bashkirs, especially those living in
Ufa, and some thousands of Maris. Mordva's Qaratay group also speak Tatar. The Tatar language is an international communication language between
Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvashs,
Kazakhs, Maris, Mordvins, and Udmurts.
Official status
Tatar is the official language of the
Republic of Tatarstan. The official script of Tatar language is based on the
Cyrillic alphabet with some additional letters not used in Slavic languages. Sometimes other scripts are used, mostly Latin and Arabic. All official sources in Tatarstan use Cyrillic at their web-sites and publishing. In other cases, where Tatar has no official status, the use of a specific alphabet depends on the preference of the author. Guides in Tatarstan are published in two alphabets.
The Tatar language was made a de facto official language in Russia in 1917 , but only in the Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Socialist Republic. Tatar is also considered the
only official language in
Idel-Ural State.
One should note however, that Bolshevist Russia did not recognize
official languages as such; however, there were a number of languages that could be used in trial in some republics. In the
Soviet epoch, Tatar was such a language in
Bashkortostan,
Mari El and other regions of the Russian SFSR .
The usage of Tatar declined from the
1930s onwards. In the
1980s it was not studied in city schools, not even by Tatar pupils. Although the language was used in rural schools, Tatar-speaking pupils had little chance to enter university, because all higher education was in Russian.
In the beginning of the
1990s most
Russian republics declared their
titular nation's language as official. In
Bashkortostan, the Tatar population exceeds that of the Bashkir; however, Tatar does not have an official status, even though 0.5 million Bashkirs and all Bashkortostan Tatars speak it. At the last presidential election current president Murtaza Rakhimov was supported by Tatars only because he promised to make Tatar the third official language of
Bashkortostan.
According to some, Tatar is no longer an endangered language, although it is still a low prestige language. Higher education in Tatar can only be found in
Tatarstan, and is restricted to the humanities. In other regions Tatar is primarily a spoken language and the number of speakers as well as their proficiency tends to decrease. Tatar is popular as a written language only in Tatar-speaking areas where schools with Tatar language lessons are situated. On the other hand, Tatar is the only language in use in rural
districts of Tatarstan.
Dialects of Kazan Tatar
There are 3 main dialects of Tatar: Western , Middle , and Eastern . All of these dialects also have subdivisions.
Misär
In the Western dialect
Ç is pronounced as and as .
C is pronounced as . There are no differences between
v and
w,
q and
k,
g and
g in Misär dialect. So, modern Tatar Cyrillic alphabet represent Mishar pronunciation WYSIWYS, but for the main speakers of the language Cyrillic has difficult rules to pronounce right.
Middle
Minzälä
In the Minzälä subdialect of the Middle Dialect z is pronounced as , as opposed to other dialects where it is silent.
Slang
In bilingual city people often pronounce x instead of h, k instead of q, g instead of g , v instead of w - or making the distinction is less common than it used to be. This could be viewed as an influence of the Russian language. Another theory is that these cities were places where both the Western and Middle dialects were used.
The influence of Russian language is significant. Russian words and phrases are used with Tatar grammar or Russian grammar in Tatar texts. Some Russian verbs are taken entirely, un-nativized, and followed with itärgä. Some English words and phrases are also used.
Siberian Tatar
The Siberian Tatars use a different language than literary Kazan Tatar. Kazan Tatar was used as literary writing language before 1930, but since then only Russian has been used as a written language.
Siberian Tatars pronounce [ts] instead of ç, [j] instead of c and sometimes [p] and [t] instead of b and d. There are also grammatical differences within the dialect, scattered across Western Siberia.
The language of the Chulym Tatars is considered to be an independent language, as are the other "Tatar" languages to the East of them.
Tatar in Russia
There are ~5,300,000 Tatar speakers in Russia. Only ~4,500,000 of them are Tatars. . Other speakers are Bashkirs , Russians , Chuvashs , Maris , Udmurts and Mordvins. There are local Tatar language speakers in Tatarstan, this number includes Azeri, Armenian, Kazakh and Jewish communities.
Phonology
Vowels
Tatar has 16 vowel symbols representing a variable number of sounds. As a Turkic language, Tatar exhibits vowel harmony, with some of the vowels considered front and others back.
Front vowels: ä , â , e , é , i , ó , ö , ü
Back vowels: , á , í , i , o , u-ú
The usage of í, â, á, ó, ú, é is not universal, and sometimes iy, a, ya, yo, yu and e are used instead.
Some of them are found only in Slavic loanwords, such as é, ó, long o, long i. Acute in á, ó, ú denotes palatalisation, but sometimes a palatalisated consonant is marked by following y before the vowel. This is only a problem for Russian loanwords.
The commonly pronounced 10 vowels are native Tatar vowels: a-ä, u-ü, í-i, o-ö, i-e. The last two pairs considered to be short vowels. They also could mean a long vowels, but only in loanwords. and are not considered to be an independent vowels. Loaned vowels considered to be back vowels.
Consonants
Most of these phonemes are common to or have equivalents in all Turkic languages.
The phonemes , and were borrowed from Arabic and European languages in the Middle Ages, while /v/ was borrowed in the beginning of 20th century. Differentiation between /h/ and /x/ appeared in the 10th century with the appearance of the word Allah and the strongest influence of Arabic and Persian languages. During the atheistic Soviet period, the occurrence of greatly reduced.
Pronunciation of loanwords
While the consonants , and are not native to Tatar, they are well established. However, Tatars usually substitute fricatives for affricates, for example for , or for and for . Nevertheless, literary traditions recommend pronunciation of affricates in loanwords.
is a sound found in Arabic loanwords and Islamic prayers. It is usually pronounced as in loanwords.
Palatalisation
Palatalisation is not common in the Tatar language. As a result, Tatar speakers have no problem using the Arabic and Ja?alif scripts, neither of which has an accepted method for indicating palatisation.
In general, Russian words with palatalisation have entered into the speech of bilingual Tatars since the 1930s. When writing in the Cyrillic alphabet Russian words were spelled as they were in the Russian language. In today's Latin orthography, palatalisation is sometimes represented by an acute diacritic under the vowel.
Some Tatars speak Russian without palatalisation, which is known as a Tatar accent.
Syllable types
Phonetic replacement
Tatar phonotactics dictate many pronunciation changes.
Unrounded vowels may be pronounced as rounded after o or ö:
qori /qoro/
borin /boron/
közge /közgö/
sori /soro/)
Nasals are assimilated to following stops:
unber /umber/
mengeç /meñgeç/
Voicing may also undergo assimilation:
küzsez /küssez/
Unstressed vowels may be syncopated or reduced:
urini /urni/
kilene /kilne/
bezne /bezne/
kerdem /kerdem/
qirgiç /qirgiç/
Vowels may also be elided:
qara urman /qar'urman/
kilä ide /kilä'yde/
turi uram /tur'uram/
bula almím /bul'almím/
In consonant clusters longer than two phones, i or e is inserted into speech as an epenthetic vowel.
tekst ? /tekest/
bank ? /banik/
Final devoicing is also frequent:
tabíb ? [tabíp]
Grammar
Like other Turkic languages, Tatar is an agglutinative language.
Plural
- After vowels, consonants, hard: -lar
- After vowels, consonants, soft: -lär
- After nasals, hard: -nar
- After nasals, soft: -när
Writing system
Tatar has been written in a number of different alphabets.
Writing was adopted from the Bolgar language, which used the Orkhon script, before the 920s. Later, the Arabic alphabet was also used, as well as the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.
Pre-1928
Before 1928 Tatar was written with a variant of the Arabic alphabet .
1927-1938
In Soviet Union Tatar was written with a Latin orthography called Ja?alif.
Cyrillic
In Tatarstan and all other parts of Russia a Cyrillic alphabet is used to write Tatar; also in Kazakhstan.
Modern Latin
A Latin alphabet-based system has been used mostly in Tatarstan since 2000 and generally on the Internet, although this has been less common more recently due to the Russian law that all languages of Russia must be written in Cyrillic.
History
Tatar's ancestors are the extinct Bolgar and Kipchak languages.
The literary Tatar language is based on Kazan Tatar's Middle dialect and the Old Tatar language . Both are members of the Kypchak group of Turkic languages, although they are also partly derived from the ancient Volga Bolgar language.
The Tatar language strongly influenced most of the Caucasian, Slavic and Finnic languages in the Volga River area.
Examples
- äye - yes
- yuq - no
- isänme/sawmi - hello
- sälâm - hi
- saw bul/xus - bye bye
- zínhar öçen - please
- min - I
- sin - you
- ul - he / she / it
- bez - we
- sez - you
- alar - they
- millät - nation
- Ingliz - English
See also
External links
Language studies
Forums
-
-
- IRC channel [irc://irc.freenode.net/tatar #tatar] on the FreeNode network
History and literature
Dictionaries
