Kumyk language

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Kumyk (къумукъ тили)

Spoken in

Russia
speaker 446,000
Linguistic
classification

Altaic languages (controversial)

Turkic languages
Kipchak languages
  • Kumyk
Official status
Official language in Dagestani flag Dagestan
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

cum

ISO 639-3

cum

The Kumyk language (own name: къумукъ тили / qumuq tili /), or Kumyk for short , is a Kipchak language of the Pontic-Caspian subgroup. As such, this language belongs to the Turkic languages .

Main distribution area

The main distribution area of ​​this language is in the eastern part of the North Caucasus . Kumyk is spoken there mainly in the Republic of Dagestan , where the language has an official status. The center of the Kumyken represents the coastal region to the Caspian Sea. Further speaker communities can be found in Chechnya , Ingushetia and in North Ossetia-Alania . In addition, Kumyks live as migrants in many other regions of Russia. Particularly noteworthy is the Tyumen Oblast , where almost 20,000 people identified themselves as Kumyks in the 2010 census. For a while, Kumyk functioned as a kind of "lingua franca" in the Caucasus region and has many similarities to the neighboring Turkic languages.

Alternative names

An outdated term for this language is Tatar or Mountain Tartar . With this name all Turkic languages ​​of the region were wrongly combined. Furthermore, Kumyk is also often written in Kumuk .

In Turkey , this language is generally only referred to as kumuk turkçesi  "Kumuk Turkish".

Classification options

The Kumyk language is classified differently. The Fischer Lexikon Sprachen (1987) lists this language within the Turkic languages ​​as follows.

  • Turkic languages
  • Western branch
  • Bulgarian group
  • Oghuz group
  • Kipchak group
  • Kipchak-Oghuz group
  • Kumyk

In contrast, the Metzler Lexicon Language (1993) classifies language as follows:

  • Turkic languages
  • Southwest Turkish (Oghusian)
  • Eastern Turkish (Karlukisch)
  • West Turkish (Kipchak)
  • Ural (Kipchak-Bulgarian)
  • Pontic Caspian (Kipchak-Oghusian)
  • Kumyk

The current classification is given in the article Turkic languages .

Dialects and alphabets

The 1935 Kumyk alphabet

The Kumyk language is structured dialectally . The most important dialects are:

  1. Khasavyurt (also "Khasavyurt" and "Qasav-Yurt" is written), the northern dialect and language transition to Nogai . Today's written language was created on the basis of this dialect
  2. Buinak (also spelled “Buynak”), the central dialect
  3. Chaidak (also spelled “Kaytak” and “Qaidak”), the southern dialect

Although Kumyk belongs to the southwestern branch of the Turkic languages, it has a lot in common with Azerbaijani , from which it was heavily influenced, especially in the 1920s. The table below shows some examples of where Kumyk is contrasted with Azerbaijani and Turkish. For the sake of readability, Kumyk is written here in Latin letters:

Kumyk Azerbaijani Turkish translation
gelecekmen gələcəyəm / gələcəm geleceğim I will come.
gelecekbiz gələcəyik geleceğiz We will come.
geleceksiz gələcəksiz / gələcəksiniz geleceksiniz You will come.

The Kumyk language probably forms a transition area from the Kipchak to the Oghus Turkish language area . Their closest relatives are Nogai and Karachay-Balkar .

As a written language , the Kumyks used classical Persian in the 13th century . From the 15th century , Chagatan was also introduced as a superordinate language; Persian was just the language of poetry and science.

With the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, Russian became the lingua franca in the Caucasus. In the late 19th century , in the course of the nationalization of the peoples of the Russian Empire, their language was also raised to an independent written language, which was written with the Arabic alphabet and the additional characters customary in Persian.

In 1929, the Kumyks also adopted the Latinization of the non-Slavic peoples of Russia when they introduced the " uniform Turkic-language alphabet " to write their language. At the turn of the year 1937/1938, Kumyk was changed to an adapted Cyrillic alphabet , which has been retained until today.

In 1988/89 some circles of the Kumyk population called for a return to the Arabic script and in the 1990s the Kumyks experimented with some Latin alphabets. None of these writing systems (Arabic and Latin) were able to replace the Cyrillic script, also because government agencies were opposed to these projects. The Kumyks write with the Cyrillic alphabet to this day. Panturkisten use today in many modern Turkish literary language to their goals and programs in the Internet to propagate .

Modern Kumyk alphabet:

А а Б б В в Г г Гъ гъ Гь гь Д д Е е
Ё ё Ж ж З з И и Й й К к Къ къ Л л
М м Н н Нг нг О о Оь оь П п Р р С с
Т т У у Уь уь Ф ф Х х Ц ц Ч ч Ш ш
Щ щ Ъ ъ Ы ы Ь ь Э э Ю ю Я я

The language code is KSK.

Language policy

In the 1920s, attempts were made to establish Kumyk as the main vernacular in Dagestan, but this project was abandoned in favor of Russian.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. 2010 Russian Census ( MS Excel )
  2. a b Helmut Glück (Ed.): Metzler Lexikon Sprachen , p. 347
  3. ^ Heinz F. Wendt: Fischer Lexikon Sprachen , pp. 328–329
  4. Helmut Glück (Ed.): Metzler Lexikon Sprache , p. 657