Crimean Tatar language: features and main characteristics

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

Crimean Tatars

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

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

The historical formation of the Crimean Tatars into a separate ethnic group took place 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 the Caucasians. The exception is the subethnos of the nogai, which has the features of both a Caucasian and a Mongoloid race.

Crimean Tatar language

The Crimean language is spoken by approximately 490 thousand people. It is distributed in Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Romania, Turkey and is one of the common languages ​​in the Republic of Crimea.

Latin is usually used in writing, although Cyrillic is also possible. 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", but not too close. Both languages ​​belong to the Turkic and belong to the Kypchak subgroup. Further their branches diverge. Tatar was strongly influenced by Finno-Ugric, Russian, and Arabic. The Crimean Tatar was influenced by Italians, Greeks, Polovtsy and Kipchaks.

Dialects

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

The southern, or Yaliboy, dialect is close to the Turkish language. Italians and Greeks living on the southern coast of the peninsula had a significant influence on him. In the dialect there are many words borrowed from their languages.

The most common is the middle dialect. It represents an intermediate link between two others. It belongs 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 belongs to the Turkic languages, which, in turn, belong to the Altai group, along with the Mongolian, Korean and Tungus-Manchu languages. However, this theory also has opponents who deny the existence of the Altai group in principle.

There are other difficulties in language classification. As a rule, it belongs to the Kypchak-Polovtsian subgroup of languages. This is incorrect, because then its connection with the Oguz languages, which is observed in the average dialect, is not taken into account.

Given all the dialectical features of the Crimean language, it is classified as follows:

History and writing

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

During 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 19th century. Then, thanks to Ismail Gasprinsky , the literary Crimean Tatar language appeared. It was based on the southern dialect.

Until 1927, the letter was written in Arabic characters. The following year, the middle dialect was chosen as the basis for the literary language, and the written language was translated into the Latin alphabet. He was called the "Yanalif", or "the unified Turkic alphabet."

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

Vocabulary and main characteristics

Crimean Tatar is an agglutinative language. The meaning of words and phrases does not change due to endings, but by “sticking” suffixes and affixes to words. They can carry information not only about the lexical meaning of a word, but also about the relationship between words, etc.

The 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 gender of pronouns and nouns. For example, he, she, the Russian words, it corresponds to only one form - “o”.

Currently, a book, a dictionary and a translator into the Crimean Tatar language on the Internet is very simple to find. Therefore, familiarization with it will not be difficult. The following are some examples of standard phrases and words in this language: