Crimean Tatar language: features and main characteristics

What is the Crimean Tatar language? What grammatical features does he have? Is the Tatar language related to it? We will look for answers to these questions.

Crimean Tatars

Crimean Tatar people are often identified with Tatars living in Russia. This error occurs from the time of the Russian Empire, when all the nomadic Turkic-speaking peoples called "Tatars". They also included Kumyks, Azerbaijanis, etc.

The Tatars in the Crimea represent the indigenous population. Their descendants are various ancient tribes inhabiting the northern Black Sea coast. A significant role in ethnogenesis was played by the Turkic peoples, Polovtsians, Khazars, Pechenegs, Karaites, Huns and Krymchaks.

The historical formation of the Crimean Tatars in a separate ethnos took place on the territory of the peninsula in the 13th-17th centuries. Among its representatives, the self-name of the "Crimean" is often used. According to the anthropological type, they belong to the Europeans. The exception is the subethnos of the Nogai, which has features of both Caucasoid and Mongoloid races.

The Crimean Tatar language

About 490 thousand people speak the Crimean language. It is distributed in the territory of Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Romania, Turkey and is one of the most widely spoken languages in the Republic of Crimea.

The writing is usually Latin, 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.

The Tatar language belongs to him "relative", but not too close. Both languages belong to the Türkic language and are part of the Kypchak subgroup. Further their branches diverge. The Finno-Ugric, Russian, and Arabic languages influenced the Tatar language. The Crimean Tatar influence was exerted by the Italians, Greeks, Polovtsians and Kypchaks.

Dialects

The Crimean Tatar people are divided into three main subethnoses, each of which speaks its own dialect. In the northern part of the peninsula, a steppe dialect was formed, belonging to the Nogai-Kypchak languages.

Southern, or Yaliboy, the dialect is close to the Turkish language. Significant influence on him had 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 average dialect. It represents an intermediate link between the other two. Refers to the Polovtsian-Kypchak group of Turkic languages and contains many Oguz elements. Each dialect includes several dialects.

Classification and features

The Crimean Tatar language is referred to the Turkic languages, which, in turn, are attributed to the Altaic group along with Mongolian, Korean and Tungus-Manchurian languages. However, this theory has opponents who deny the existence of the Altaic group in principle.

There are other difficulties in classifying the language. As a rule, it is referred to the Kypchak-Polovtsian 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 dialectic features of the Crimean language, it is classified as follows:

History and script

Dialects of language arose in the Middle Ages. At that time, a large number of nationalities lived on the Crimean lands, which influenced the formation of the language. That is why the Crimean Tatar language differs significantly in different parts of the peninsula.

During the period of the Crimean Khanate, the population was forced to speak Ottoman. During the Russian Empire, the culture of the Crimeans was in decline. Its restoration began in the XIX century. Then, thanks to Ismail Gasprinsky, a literary Crimean-Tatar language appeared. It is based on the southern dialect.

Until 1927 the letter was conducted with Arabic symbols. The following year, the middle dialect was chosen as the basis for the literary language, and the writing was translated into the Latin alphabet. He was called "Yanalif", or "a single Turkic alphabet".

In 1939, he tried to make Cyrillic, but in the 90's the return of the Latin letter began. It was somewhat different from Yanalife: non-standard letters of the Latin alphabet were replaced by symbols with diacritical marks, which added similarities to the Turkish language.

Vocabulary and main characteristics

Crimean Tatar is an agglutinative language. The meaning of words and phrases varies not at the expense of endings, but with the help of "gluing" to words of suffixes and affixes. They can carry information not only about the lexical meaning of the word, but also about the connection between words, etc.

Language contains eleven parts of speech, six cases, four types of conjugation of verbs, three forms of verb tense (present, past and future). It lacks the kind of pronouns and nouns. For example, he said to the Russian, she, it corresponds to only one form - "o".

At present, a book, a dictionary and an interpreter for the Crimean Tatar language on the Internet can be found very simply. Therefore, familiarization with it will not be very difficult. Below are some examples of standard phrases and words of this language: