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
The Crimean Tatar people are often identified with the Tatars living in Russia. This misconception has been going on since the time of the existence of the Russian Empire, when all nomadic Turkic-speaking peoples were called "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. The Turkic peoples, Cumans, Khazars, Pechenegs, Karaites, Huns and Krymchaks played a significant role in ethnogenesis.
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. According to the anthropological type, they belong to the Caucasoids. The exception is the Nogai subethnos, which has features of both Caucasoid and Mongoloid races.
Crimean Tatar language
Crimean is spoken by about 490 thousand people. It is extended toterritory of Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Romania, Turkey and is one of the common languages in the Republic of Crimea.
In writing, the Latin alphabet is usually used, although Cyrillic writing is also possible. Most of the native speakers live in the Crimea (almost 300 thousand people). There are about 30,000 Crimean Tatars in Bulgaria and Romania.
The Tatar language is his "relative", but not too close. Both languages belong to the Turkic and are included in the Kypchak subgroup. Further, their branches diverge. Tatar was strongly influenced by Finno-Ugric, Russian, and Arabic. The Crimean Tatars were influenced by Italians, Greeks, Cumans and Kypchaks.
Dialects
The Crimean Tatar people are divided into three main sub-ethnoses, 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.
The southern, or Yalyboy, dialect is close to the Turkish language. It was significantly influenced by the Italians and Greeks living on the southern shores of the peninsula. There are many words borrowed from their languages in the dialect.
The most common is the middle dialect. It represents an intermediate link between the other two. It belongs to the Polovtsian-Kypchak group of Turkic languages and contains many Oghuz elements. Each dialect includes several dialects.
Classification and features
The Crimean Tatar language belongs to the Turkiclanguages, which, in turn, belong to the Altaic group along with the Mongolian, Korean and Tungus-Manchurian languages. However, this theory also has opponents who deny the existence of the Altai group in principle.
There are other difficulties in the classification of language. As a rule, it is attributed 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 dialectical features of the Crimean language, it is classified as follows:
| Area | Languages of Eurasia | ||
| Family | Altai (debatable) | ||
| Branch | Turkic | ||
| Group | Oghuz | Kypchak | |
| Subgroup | Turkish | Polovtsian-Kipchak | Nogai-Kypchak |
| Dialects | South Coast | Medium | Steppe |
History and writing
Dialects of the language originated 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 varies significantly in different parts of the peninsula.
During the period of the Crimean Khanate, the population was forced to speak Ottoman. At timesIn 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 script was transferred to the Latin alphabet. It was called "yanalif", or "single Turkic alphabet".
In 1939, they tried to make it Cyrillic, but in the 90s, the return of the Latin script began. It was somewhat different from yanalif: non-standard Latin letters were replaced by characters with diacritical marks, which added similarity to 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 “gluing” 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 verb conjugation, three forms of verb tense (present, past and future). It lacks the gender of pronouns and nouns. For example, Russian words he, she, it corresponds to only one form - "o".
Currently, it is very easy to find a book, dictionary and translator into the Crimean Tatar language on the Internet. Therefore, getting to know him will not be big.labor. Below are some examples of standard phrases and words in this language:
| Russian | Crimean Tatar |
| Hello | Selâm! / Meraba |
| Yes | Ebet |
| No | Yoq |
| How are you? | İşler nasıl? |
| Thank you! | Sağ oluñız! |
| Sorry | Afu etiñiz |
| Goodbye! | Sağlıqnen qalıñız! |
| Father | baba |
| Mother | ana |
| Big brother | ağa |
| Big sister | abla |
| Sky | kök, sema |
| Earth | topraq, yer |
