Bashkir Language

Bashkir (, ; Bashkir: ''Bashqortsa'', ''Bashqort tele'', ) is a Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak branch. It is co-official with Russian in Bashkortostan. It is spoken by approximately 1.4 million native speakers in Russia, as well as in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Estonia and other neighboring post-Soviet states, and among the Bashkir diaspora. It has three dialect groups: Southern, Eastern and Northwestern.

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 other countries.

Classification

Bashkir together with Tatar belongs to the Bulgaric (russian: кыпчакско-булгарская) subgroups of the Kipchak languages. They share the same vocalism and the vowel shifts (see 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 Bashkir is written explicitly, e.g. Tatar тормышым ''tormïshïm'' and Bashkir тормошом ''tormoshom'', both pronounced , meaning "my life".

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 .

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.)

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, 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.

Declension of nouns

Declension of pronouns

References

Further reading

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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