Crimean Tatar language: features and main characteristics
What is the Crimean Tatar language? What grammatical features does it have? Is the Tatar language related to it? We will look for answers to these questions.
Crimean Tatars
Crimean Tatar people are often identified withTatars living in Russia. This misconception has occurred since the time of the Russian Empire, when all nomadic Turkic-speaking peoples were called “Tatars”. These also included Kumyks, Azerbaijanis, etc.
Tatars in Crimea represent the indigenous population. Their descendants are various ancient tribes inhabiting the Northern Black Sea region. The Turkic peoples, the Polovtsy, the Khazars, the Pechenegs, the Karaites, the Huns, and the Krymchaks played a significant role in ethnogenesis.
The historical formation of the Crimean Tatars ina separate ethnos occurred on the territory of the peninsula in the XIII-XVII centuries. Among its representatives, the self-name “Crimeans” is often used. By anthropological type, they belong to Caucasians. An exception is the subethnos legai, which has features of both Caucasoid and Mongoloid races.
Crimean Tatar language
About 490 thousand people speak the Crimean language. It is spread on the territory of Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Romania, Turkey and is one of the common languages in the Republic of Crimea.
The Latin alphabet is commonly used in writing.although it is possible to write in Cyrillic. Most of the native speakers live in the Crimea (almost 300 thousand people). In Bulgaria and Romania, the number of Crimean Tatars is about 30 thousand.
Tatar language is his “relative”, butnot too close. Both languages are Turkic and belong to the Kypchak subgroup. Further their branches diverge. The Tatar language was strongly influenced by the Finno-Ugric, Russian, Arabic languages. The Italians, Greeks, Polovtsy and Kipchaks exerted influence on the Crimean Tatar.
Dialects
Crimean Tatar people are divided into three mainsubethnos, each of which speaks its own dialect. In the northern part of the peninsula formed a steppe dialect belonging to the Nogai-Kipchak languages.
Southern, or Ilyaboy, dialect close toTurkish language. It was greatly influenced by the Italians and Greeks living on the southern shores of the peninsula. In the dialect there are many words borrowed from their languages.
The most common is the averagedialect. It represents the intermediate between the other two. It belongs to the Polovtsian-Kipchak group of Turkic languages and contains many Oguz elements. Each dialect includes several dialects.
Classification and features
Crimean Tatar language belongs to the Turkic languages,which, in turn, belong to the Altai group together with the Mongolian, Korean and Tungus-Manchurian languages. However, this theory has opponents who deny the existence of the Altai group in principle.
There are other difficulties in classifying a language. As a rule, it belongs to the Kypchak-Polovtsy subgroup of languages. This is incorrect, because then its connection with the Oguz languages, which is observed in the middle dialect, is not taken into account.
Given all the dialectical features of the Crimean language, it is classified as follows:
Areal | Languages of Eurasia | ||
A family | Altai (debatable) | ||
Branch | Turkic | ||
Group | Oguz | Kypchak | |
Subgroup | Turkish | Polovtsian-Kypchak | Nogai-Kypchak |
Dialects | South Coast | Average | Steppe |
History and writing
The dialects of language originated in the Middle Ages. At that time, a large number of ethnic groups lived on the Crimean lands, which influenced the formation of the language. That is why the Crimean Tatar language varies considerably in different parts of the peninsula.
In the period of the Crimean Khanate the population wasforced to speak Ottoman. During the Russian Empire, the culture of the Crimeans was in decline. Its restoration began in the nineteenth century. Then, thanks to Ismail Gasprinsky, the literary Crimean Tatar language appeared. It is based on the southern dialect.
Until 1927, the letter was conducted in Arabic characters. The following year, the middle dialect was chosen as the basis for the literary language, and the script was translated into the Latin alphabet. He was called "Yanalif", or "a single Turkic alphabet."
In 1939 they tried to make him Cyrillic,however, in the 90s, the return of the Latin letter began. It was somewhat different from the alphabet: the non-standard letters of the Latin alphabet were replaced with accented characters, which added similarities to the Turkish language.
Vocabulary and main characteristics
Crimean Tatar is an agglutinative language. The meaning of words and phrases does not change at the expense of endings, but with the help of “sticking” to the words of suffixes and affixes. They can carry information not only about the lexical meaning of a word, but also about the connection between words, etc.
The language contains eleven parts of speech, sixcases, four verb conjugations, three forms of verb tense (present, past and future). It lacks the gender of pronouns and nouns. For example, in Russian words he, she, it corresponds only to one form - “o”.
Currently a book, dictionary and translatorCrimean Tatar language on the Internet is very easy to find. Therefore, familiarization with it will not be difficult. Below are some examples of standard phrases and words of this language:
Russian | Crimean Tatar |
Hello | Selâm! / Meraba |
Yes | Ebet |
No | Yoq |
How are you? | İşler nasıl? |
Thank! | Sağ oluñız! |
excuse me | Afu etiñiz |
Goodbye! | Sağlıqnen qalıñız! |
Father | baba |
Mother | ana |
Older brother | ağa |
Older sister | abla |
Sky | kök sema |
Earth | topraq, yer |
