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Tatar language
Tatar
татарча / Tatarça / تاتارچا
Spoken in: Russia, other former Soviet Union
Total speakers: 8 million
Language family: Altaic[1] (controversial)
Turkic
Kypchak
Kypchak–Bolgar
Tatar
Official status
Official language in: Tatarstan
Regulated by: No official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: tt
ISO 639-2: tat
ISO 639-3: tat
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
The Tatar language (Tatar tele, Tatarça, Татар теле, Татарча) is a Turkic language spoken by the Tatars.
Classification
Tatar is a Turkic language, which is considered part of the disputed Altaic language family.
Geographic distribution
Tatar is spoken in Russia, Central Asia, Ukraine, Poland, China, Finland and Turkey.
Tatar is also native for 400,000 Bashkirs, especially those living in Ufa, and some thousands of Maris. Mordva’s Qaratay group also speak Tatar. 94% of ethnic Tatar and 7% of the people of other ethnicities living in Tatarstan claimed knowledge of Tatar language during the 2002 census.[2]
Official status
Bilingual guide in Kazan Metro.
Tatar is the official language of the Republic of Tatarstan. The official script of Tatar language is based on the Cyrillic alphabet with some additional letters not used in Slavic languages. Sometimes other scripts are used, mostly Latin and Arabic. All official sources in Tatarstan use Cyrillic at their web-sites and publishing. In other cases, where Tatar has no official status, the use of a specific alphabet depends on the preference of the author. Guides in Tatarstan are published in two alphabets.
The Tatar language was made a de facto official language in Russia in 1917 (for the first time since 1552, when the Kazan Khanate was annexed by Russia), but only in the Tatar–Bashkir Soviet Socialist Republic. Tatar is also considered the official language in Idel-Ural State.
One should note, however, that Bolshevist Russia did not recognize official languages as such; however, there were a number of languages that could be used in trial in some republics. In the Soviet epoch, Tatar was such a language in Bashkortostan, Mari El and other regions of the Russian SFSR (the Soviet Republic comprised of the area of modern-day Russia).
The usage of Tatar declined from the 1930s onwards. In the 1980s it was not studied in city schools, not even by Tatar pupils. Although the language was used in rural schools, Tatar-speaking pupils had little chance to enter university, because all higher education was in Russian.
According to some, Tatar is no longer an endangered language, although it is still a low prestige language. Higher education in Tatar can only be found in Tatarstan, and is restricted to the humanities. In other regions Tatar is primarily a spoken language and the number of speakers as well as their proficiency tends to decrease. Tatar is popular as a written language only in Tatar-speaking areas where schools with Tatar language lessons are situated. On the other hand, Tatar is the only language in use in rural districts of Tatarstan.
Dialects of Tatar
There are 3 main dialects of Tatar: Western (Mişär or Mishar), Middle (Tatarstan’s most popular language), and Eastern (Siberian). All of these dialects also have subdivisions.
Mişär
In the Western (Mişär) dialect Ç is pronounced as [ʧ] (southern or lambir mishars) and as [ʦ] (northern mishars or nizhgars). C is pronounced as [ʤ]. There are no differences between v and w, q and k, g and ğ in Mişär dialect. So, modern Tatar Cyrillic alphabet represent Mishar pronunciation WYSIWYS, but for the main speakers of the language Cyrillic has difficult rules to pronounce right. (Cyrillic Tatar doesn’t have special letters for q, ğ and w)
This is the dialect spoken by the Tatar minority of Finland.
Middle
Minzälä
In the Minzälä subdialect of the Middle Dialect z is pronounced as [ð], as opposed to other dialects where it is silent.
Slang
Tatar-Russian code-switching
In bilingual city people often pronounce x instead of h, k instead of q, g instead of ğ , v instead of w - or making the distinction is less common than it used to be. This could be viewed as an influence of the Russian language. Another theory is that these cities were places where both the western and middle dialects were used.
The influence of Russian language is significant. Russian words and phrases are used with Tatar grammar or Russian grammar in Tatar texts. Some Russian verbs are taken entirely, un-nativized, and followed with itärgä. Some English words and phrases are also used.
There was a distinct cryptolect the Gäp, spoken predominantly in Kazan, but now it is extinct or near the extinction.
Siberian Tatar
Siberian Tatars pronounce [ts] instead of ç, [j] instead of c and sometimes [p] and [t] instead of b and d. There are also grammatical differences within the dialect, scattered across Siberia.
Information about Siberian Tatar
Tatar in Russia
There are some 5,300,000 Tatar speakers in Russia . Other speakers are Bashkirs (400,000), Russians (130,000), Chuvashs (70,000), Maris (42,000) and Qaratays.
[edit]Phonology
Vowels
Tatar has 16 vowel symbols representing a variable number of sounds. As a Turkic language, Tatar exhibits vowel harmony, with some of the vowels considered front and others back.
Front vowels: ä [æ~ə], â [æ], e [e], é [ɛ], i [i], ó [ø], ö [œ], ü [y]
Back vowels: a [ɑ~ʌ], á [ɑ], í [ɯɪ], ı [ɯ~ɨ:], o [o~o:], u–ú [u]
The usage of í, â, á, ó, ú, é is not universal, and sometimes ıy, a, ya, yo, yu and e are used instead.
Some of them are found only in Slavic loanwords, such as é, ó, long o, long ı. Acute in á, ó, ú denotes palatalisation, but sometimes a palatalisated consonant is marked by following y before the vowel. This is only a problem for Russian loanwords.
The commonly pronounced 10 vowels are native Tatar vowels: a–ä, u–ü, í–i, o–ö, ı–e. The last two pairs are considered to be short vowels. They also could mean a long vowels, but only in loanwords. [ə] and [ʌ] are not considered to be independent vowels. Loaned vowels are considered to be back vowels.
[edit]Consonants
The consonants of Tatar
Bilabial Labio-
dental Dental Alveolar Post-
alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal
Plosives p /p/ b /b/ t /t/ d /d/ k /k/ ɡ /ɡ/ q /q/
Nasals m /m/ n /n/ ñ /ŋ/
Fricatives f /f/ v /v/ s /s/ z /z/ ş /ʃ/
ç /ɕ/ j /ʒ/
c /ʑ/ ğ /ɣ/ h /h/
Trill r /r/
Approximant y /j/ ([j~ɪ])
Lateral
approximant l /l/
Most of these phonemes are common to or have equivalents in all Turkic languages.
The phonemes /f/, /x/ and /ʒ/ were borrowed from Arabic and European languages in the Middle Ages, while /v/ was borrowed in the beginning of 20th century. Differentiation between /h/ and /x/ appeared in the 10th century with the appearance of the word Allah and the strongest influence of Arabic and Persian languages. During the atheistic Soviet period, the occurrence of /h/ greatly reduced.
From Wikipedya Free encyclopedia
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