Areas where Khakas is spoken as a Majority language
Areas where Khakas is spoken as a Minority language
Khakas, also known asXakas,[4][a] is aTurkic language spoken by theKhakas, who mainly live in the southwestern SiberianRepublic of Khakassia, inRussia. The Khakas number 61,000, of whom 29,000 speak the Khakas language. Most Khakas speakers are bilingual inRussian.[1]
Traditionally, the Khakas language is divided into several closely related dialects, which take their names from the different tribes:Sagay [ru],Kacha [ru],Koybal,Beltir, andKyzyl[clarification needed]. In fact, these names represent former administrative units rather than tribal or linguistic groups. The people speaking all these dialects simply referred to themselves asТадар (Tadar, i.e.Tatar). The Khakas language also has a dialect named Kamas Turk (or Kamas Turkic), which according to theUNESCOAtlas of the World's Languages in Danger has been extinct since the 1950s.[5]
The people who speak theFuyu Kyrgyz language originated in the Yenisei region of Siberia but were relocated into theDzungar Khanate by theDzungars, and then the Qing moved them fromDzungaria to northeastern China in 1761, and the name may be due to the survival of a common tribal name.[6][7] The Yenisei Kirghiz were made to pay tribute in a treaty concluded between the Dzungars and Russians in 1635.[8] Sibe Bannermen were stationed in Dzungaria while it was Northeastern China (Manchuria) where some of the remaining Öelet Oirats were deported to.[9] The Nonni basin was where Oirat Öelet deportees were settled. The Yenisei Kirghiz were deported along with the Öelet.[10] Chinese and Oirat replaced Oirat and Kirghiz during Manchukuo as the dual languages of the Nonni-based Yenisei Kirghiz.[11] The present-day Kyrgyz people originally lived in the same area that the speakers of Fuyu Kyrgyz at first dwelled within modern-day Russia. These Kyrgyz were known as theYenisei Kyrgyz. It is now spoken in northeasternChina'sHeilongjiang province, in and aroundFuyu County,Qiqihar (300 km northwest ofHarbin) by a small number ofpassive speakers who are classified asKyrgyz nationality.[12]
The first major recordings of the Khakas language originate from the middle of the 19th century. TheFinnish linguistMatthias Castrén, who travelled through northern and Central Asia between 1845 and 1849, wrote a treatise on the Koybal dialect, and recorded an epic.Wilhelm Radloff traveled the southernSiberian region extensively between 1859 and 1870. The result of his research was, among others, published in his four-volume dictionary, and in his ten-volume series ofTurkic texts. The second volume contains his Khakas materials, which were provided with a German translation. The ninth volume, provided with a Russian translation, was prepared by Radloff's student Katanov, who was a Sagay himself, and contains further Khakas materials.
The Khakas literary language, which was developed only after theRussian Revolution of 1917, is based on the central dialects Sagay and Kacha; the Beltir dialect has largely been assimilated by Sagay, and the Koybal dialect by Kacha.
In 1924, aCyrillic alphabet was devised, which was replaced by aLatin alphabet in 1929, and by a new Cyrillic alphabet in 1939.[13]
In 2012, anEnduring Voices expedition documented the Xyzyl language from the Republic of Khakassia. Officially considered a dialect of Khakas, its speakers regard Xyzyl as a separate language of its own.[14]
The Khakas language is part of the South Siberian subgroup of Turkic languages, along withShor,Chulym,Tuvan,Tofa, andNorthern Altai. Thelanguage of the Turkic-speakingYugurs of Gansu and theFuyu Kyrgyz language of a small group of people in Manchuria also share some similarities with languages of this subgroup. The Khakas language has also been part of a widerlanguage area covering the SouthernSamoyedic languagesKamassian andMator. A distinctive feature that these languages share with Khakas and Shor is a process of nasal assimilation, whereby a word-initial palatal stop (in all of these languages from an earlierpalatal approximant*j) develops into analveolar nasal/n/ or apalatal nasal/ɲ/, when followed by another word-internalnasal consonant.[15]
Khakas has a core Turkic vocabulary. Although there were no historic contacts with Arabic (or Islam), the vocabulary features few Arabic words, for example,хабар "news, tiding",[19]халых "people, a mass (of people), society".[20] Some communist-minded writers of the Soviet Union tended to view such words as emanating from the efforts of bourgeois-nationalists who, they argued, tried to rid the Khakas language from Russian loanwords by importing foreign words from Arabic and Mongolic origin[21].
^Akiner, Shirin (1986).Islamic Peoples of the Soviet Union (with an Appendix on the non-Muslim Turkic peoples of the Soviet Union). Routledge. p. 410.ISBN0-7103-0188-X.
Hu, Zhen-hua & Imart, Guy (1987),Fu-Yü Gïrgïs: A tentative description of the easternmost Turkic language,Bloomington, Indiana:Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies
Anderson, G. D. S. (1998).Xakas. Languages of the world: Materials: 251. München.
Castrén, M. A. (1857).Versuch einer koibalischen und karagassischen Sprachlehre nebst Wörterverzeichnissen aus den tatarischen mundarten des minussinschen Kreises. St. Petersburg.
Donidze, M. A. (1997).Языки мира: Тюркские языки. Moscow.
Katanov, N. F. (1907).Proben der Volkslitteratur der türkischen Stämme. IX. Theil: Mundarten der Urianchaier (Sojonen), Abakan-Tataren und Karagassen. St. Petersburg.
Radloff, W. (1867).Proben der Volkslitteratur der türkischen Stämme Süd-Sibiriens. II. Theil: die Abakan-Dialecte (der Sagaische, Koibalische, Katschinzische), der Kysyl-Dialect und der Tscholym-Dialect (Küerik). St. Petersburg.
Radloff, W. (1893–1911).Versuch eines Wörterbuches der Türk-Dialecte I-IV. St. Petersburg.
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