Bashkir language

 

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 the United States.

In a recent local media report in Bashkortostan, it was reported that some officials of the republic cannot assemble a document in Bashkir language.

Bashkir together with Tatar belongs to the Kipchak-Bulgar (Russian: кыпчакско-булгарская) subgroup of the Kipchak languages. These languages have a similar vocabulary by 94.9%,^[5] and they not only have common origin, but also a common ancestor in the written language — Volga Turki. However, Bashkir differs from Tatar in several important ways:

• Bashkir has dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ in the place of Tatar (and other Turkic) /s/ and /z/. Bashkir /θ/ and /ð/, however, cannot begin a word (there are exceptions: ҙур – "zur" [ðuɾ] 'big', and the particle/conjunction ҙа – "za" [ða] or ҙә – "zə" [ðæ]. The only other Turkic language with a similar feature is Turkmen. However, in Bashkir, /θ/ and /ð/ are two independent phonemes, distinct from /s/ and /z/, whereas in Turkmen [θ] and [ð] are the two main realizations of the common Turkic /s/ and /z/. In other words, there are no /s/ and /z/ phonemes in Turkmen, unlike Bashkir which has both /s/ and /z/ and /θ/ and /ð/.
• The word-initial and morpheme-initial /s/ is turned into /h/. An example of both features can be Tatar сүз (süz) and Bashkir һүҙ (hüz), both meaning "word".
• Common Turkic /tʃ/ (Tatar /ɕ/) is turned into Bashkir /s/, e.g., Turkish ağaç [aˈatʃ], Tatar агач ağaç [ɑˈʁɑɕ] and Bashkir ағас – ağas [ɑˈʁɑs], all meaning "tree".
• The word-initial /ʑ/ in Tatar always corresponds to /j/ in Standard Bashkir, e.g., Tatar җылы cılı [ʑɤˈlɤ] and Bashkir йылы – yılı [jɯˈɫɯ], both meaning "warm". However, the eastern and northern dialects of Bashkir have the /j/ > /ʑ~ʒ/ shift.

The Bashkir orthography is more explicit. /q/ and /ʁ/ are written with their own letters Ҡ ҡ and Ғ ғ, whereas in Tatar they are treated as positional allophones of /k/ and /ɡ/, written К к and Г г.

Labial vowel harmony in Bashkir is written explicitly, e.g. Tatar тормышым tormışım and Bashkir тормошом – tormoşom, both pronounced [tʊɾ.mʊˈʂʊm], meaning "my life".^[6]

 

 

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 /æ/, Ө ө /ø/, Ү ү /ʏ/, Ғ ғ /ʁ/, Ҡ ҡ /q/, Ң ң /ŋ/, Ҙ ҙ /ð/, Ҫ ҫ /θ/, Һ һ /h/.^[6]

Bashkir has nine native vowels, and three or four loaned vowels (mainly in Russian loanwords).^[7]

Phonetically, the native vowels are approximately thus (with the Cyrillic letter followed by the usual Latin romanization in angle brackets):^[8]

In Russian loans there are also [ɨ], [ɛ], [ɔ] and [ä], written the same as the native vowels: ы, е/э, о, а respectively.^[7]

Historically, the Proto-Turkic mid vowels have raised from mid to high, whereas the Proto-Turkic high vowels have become the Bashkir reduced mid series. (The same shifts have also happened in Tatar.)^[9][6] However, in most dialects of Bashkir, this shift is not as prominent as in Tatar.

Notes

^¹ The phonemes /f/, /v/, /ʔ/ are found only in loanwords, and, in the case of /ʔ/, in a few native onomatopoeic words.

^² [β] is an intervocal allophone of [b], and it is distinct from [w]. [ɴ] is an allophone of [ŋ] in back vowel contexts. [c] and [ɟ] occur as allophones of [k] and [g] before [e], and both occur only in front vowel contexts.

• /θ, ð/ are dental [θ, ð], and /ɾ/ is apical alveolar [ɾ]. The exact place of articulation of the other dental/alveolar consonants is unclear.

A member of the Turkic language family, Bashkir is an agglutinative, SOV language.^[7][10] A large part of the Bashkir vocabulary has Turkic roots; and there are many loan words in Bashkir from Russian, Arabic and Persian sources.^[6]

The form of the plural suffix is heavily dependent on the letter which comes immediately before it. When it's a consonant, there is a four-way distinction between "л" (l), "т" (t), "ҙ" (ź) and "д" (d); The vowel's distinction is two-way between "а" (after back vowels "а" (a), "ы" (ı), "о" (o), "у" (u)) and "ә" (after front vowels "ә" (ə), "е" (e), "и" (i), "ө" (ö), "ү" (ü)). Some nouns are also less likely to be used with their plural forms such as "һыу" (hıw, "water") or "ҡом" (qom, "sand").^[6]

• Poppe, Nicholas (1997) [1964]. Bashkir Manual. Routledge. p. 186. ISBN 978-0-7007-0836-9.
• Грамматика современного башкирского литературного языка (in Russian). Москва: Наука. 1981.
• Дмитриев, Н. К. (1948). Грамматика башкирского языка (in Russian). Из-во АН СССР.

 

Bashkir edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

For a list of words relating to Bashkir language, see the Bashkir language category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

 

Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Bashkir phrasebook.

• National Corpus of the Bashkir language Archived 3 March 2022 at the Wayback Machine
• Machine fund of the Bashkir language
• Spoken corpus of Bashkir (Rakhmetovo and Baimovo) Archived 2020-08-10 at the Wayback Machine
• Short grammar of Bashkir