Aqnogai (White or Western Nogai), by theKuban River, its tributaries inKarachay–Cherkessia and in the Mineralnye Vody District. Qara-Nogai and Nogai Proper are very close linguistically, whereas Aqnogai is more different. However, all three are mutually intelligible.
Outside of the southern Caucasus, other varieties exist that are either considered dialects, or distinct languages:
TheNogais, descended from the peoples of theGolden Horde, take their name and that of their language from the grandson ofGenghis Khan,Nogai Khan, who ruled the nomadic people west of theDanube toward the end of the 13th century. They then settled along theBlack Sea coast of present-dayUkraine.
In 1938, a transition to theCyrillic alphabet began. Theorthography based on the Latin alphabet was alleged to be an impediment to learning Russian.
The expulsion of the Nogais from Ukraine in the nineteenth century separated Nogai speakers into several geographically isolated groups. Some went toTurkey andRomania, while others stayed within theRussian Empire, settling in northern Dagestan and neighbouring areas ofChechnya andStavropol Kray.
The Nogai language has disappeared very rapidly in Turkey. Today, it is mostly spoken by the older generation; however, there are still younger speakers, as there are some villages in Turkey where it is a common mode of communication. In theSoviet Union the language of instruction in schools was Russian, and the number of speakers declined there also. Recent estimates place the total number of Nogai speakers at about 80,000.
In 1973, two small Nogai-language newspapers were being published, one in Karachay–Cherkessia and another in the Dagestan Autonomous SSR (Ленин йолы), but most speakers never heard of these publications, and the papers did not reach Nogai villages.
Nogai is now part of the school curriculum from the 1st to the 10th year in the Nogai District of Dagestan. It is also taught at the Karachayevo-Cherkess Pedagogical School and the national branch of the Pedagogical Institute.
1926-1928 — standardized Arabic script specific to Nogai language
1928—1938 — writing based on the Latin alphabet
from 1938 — writing based on the Cyrillic alphabet
The Nogai alphabet based onCyrillic was created in 1938. It included all of theRussian alphabet letters exceptЁ ё, and also thedigraphsГъ гъ, Къ къ, Нъ нъ. The digraphsОь оь, Уь уь were added in the same year. In 1944 the digraphsГъ гъ, Къ къ were excluded from the alphabet.
The last reform of the Nogai writing took place in 1960, when, as a result of discussions at theKarachay-Cherkessia Research Institute, Language and Literature, the lettersАь аь andЁ ё were added to it. After that, the Nogai alphabet took its present form.[12]
^Baskakov, N.A. (1940).Nogaysky yazyk i ego dialektyНогайский язык и его диалекты: грамматика, тексты и словарь [The Nogai language and its dialects: grammar, texts, and dictionary] (in Russian). Moscow: Akademii Nauk SSSR.OCLC12067444.
