The Yakut language has a large number of words ofMongolian origin related to ancient borrowings, a layer of vocabulary of unclear origin, as well as numerous recent borrowings fromRussian. Like other Turkic languages, Yakut is anagglutinative language and featuresvowel harmony.
Historically, Yakut left the community ofCommon Turkic speakers relatively early.[4] Due to this, it diverges in many ways from other Turkic languages and mutual intelligibility between Yakut and other Turkic languages is low[5] and many cognate words are hard to notice when heard. Nevertheless, Yakut contains many features which are important for the reconstruction ofProto-Turkic, such as the preservation of long vowels.[6] Despite all the aberrant features of Sakha (i.e. Yakut), it is still considered to belong to Common Turkic (in contrast toChuvash). A relatively few scholars (W. Radlov and others) expressed the view that Sakha (i.e. Yakut) is not Turkic.
Yakut is spoken mainly in theSakha Republic. It is also used by ethnic Yakuts inKhabarovsk Region and a small diaspora in other parts of theRussian Federation,Turkey, and other parts of the world.Dolgan, a close relative of Yakut, which formerly was considered by some a dialect of Yakut,[7] is spoken byDolgans inKrasnoyarsk Region. Yakut is widely used as alingua franca by other ethnic minorities in theSakha Republic – moreDolgans,Evenks,Evens andYukagirs speak Yakut than their own languages. About 8% of the people of other ethnicities than Yakut living in Sakha claimed knowledge of the Yakut language during the2002 census.[8]
Yakut has the following consonantsphonemes,[9] where theIPA value is provided in slashes '//' and the native script value is provided in bold followed by the romanization in parentheses.
The nasal glide/ȷ̃/ is not distinguished from/j/ in the orthography, where both are written as⟨й⟩. Thusайыы can beayïï[ajɯː] 'deed, creation, work' oraỹïï[aȷ̃ɯː] 'sin, transgression'.[10] The nasal glide/ȷ̃/ has a very restricted distribution, appearing in very few words.[11]
/ɾ/ is pronounced as a flap[ɾ] between vowels, e.g.орон (oron)[oɾon] 'place', and as a trill[r] at the end of words, e.g.тур (tur)[tur] 'stand'.[12][13]
/ɾ/ does not occur at the beginning of words in native Yakut words; borrowed Russian words with onset/ɾ/ are usually rendered with an epenthetic vowel, e.g. Russianрама (rama) > Yakutараама (araama) 'frame'.
Yakut is in many ways phonologically unique among theTurkic languages. Yakut and the closely relatedDolgan language are the only Turkic languages withoutpostalveolar sibilants. Additionally, no known Turkic languages other than Yakut andKhorasani Turkic have the palatal nasal/ɲ/.
Consonants at morpheme boundaries undergo extensiveassimilation, both progressive and regressive.[14][15] All suffixes possess numerousallomorphs. For suffixes which begin with a consonant, the surface form of the consonant is conditioned on the stem-final segment. There are four sucharchiphonemic consonants:G,B,T, andL. Examples of each are provided in the following table for the suffixes-GIt (second-person plural possessive suffix,oɣoɣut 'your [pl.] child'),-BIt (first-person plural possessive suffix,oɣobut, 'our child'),-TA (partitive case suffix,tiiste 'some teeth'),-LArA (third-person plural possessive suffix,oɣoloro 'their child'). Note that the alternation in the vowels is governed by vowel harmony (seethe main article andthe below section).
There is an additional regularmorphophonological pattern for[t]-final stems: they assimilate inplace of articulation with an immediately following labial or velar. For exampleat 'horse' >akkït 'your [pl.] horse', >appït 'our horse'.
Yakut initials- corresponds to initialh- in Dolgan and played an important operative rule in the development of proto-Yakut, ultimately resulting in initialØ- <*h- <*s- (example: Dolganhuoq and Yakutsuox, both meaning "not").[clarification needed] The historical change of*s >h, known asdebuccalization, is a common sound-change across the world's languages, being characteristic of such language groups as Greek and Indo-Iranian in their development from Proto-Indo-European, as well as such Turkic languages as Bashkir, e.g.höt 'milk' <*süt.[16]
Debuccalization is also an active phonological process in modern Yakut. Intervocalically the phoneme/s/ becomes[h]. For example the /s/ inкыыс (kïïs) 'girl' becomes [h] between vowels:[17]
Yakut has twenty phonemic vowels: eight short vowels, eight long vowels,[a] and four diphthongs. The following table gives broad transcriptions for each vowel phoneme,[b] as well as the native script bold and romanization in italics:
^The long vowel phonemes /eː/, /ɔː/, and /øː/ appear in very few words and are thus consideredmarginal phonemes.[18]
^Note that these vowels are extremely broad. Narrower transcriptions[19] transcribe the high back non-front vowelы as central/ɨ/. The front non-high unrounded open vowel inэ,ээ, andиэ are more accurately[ɛ],[ɛː],[iɛ], respectively.
Like otherTurkic languages, a characteristic feature of Yakut isprogressive vowel harmony. Most root words obey vowel harmony, for example inкэлин (kelin) 'back', all the vowels are front and unrounded. Yakut's vowel harmony in suffixes is the most complex system in the Turkic family.[24] Vowel harmony is anassimilation process where vowels in one syllable take on certain features of vowels in the preceding syllable. In Yakut, subsequent vowels all take onfrontness and all non-low vowels take onlip rounding of preceding syllables' vowels.[25] There are two main rules of vowel harmony:
Frontness/backness harmony:
Front vowels are always followed by front vowels.
Back vowels are always followed by back vowels.
Rounding harmony:
Unrounded vowels are always followed by unrounded vowels.
Close rounded vowels always occur after close rounded vowels.
Open unrounded vowelsdo not assimilate in rounding with close rounded vowels.
The quality of the diphthongs /ie, ïa, uo, üö/ for the purposes of vowel harmony is determined by the first segment in the diphthong. Taken together, these rules mean that the pattern of subsequent syllables in Yakut is entirely predictable, and all words will follow the following pattern:[26] Like theconsonant assimilation rules above, suffixes display numerous allomorphs determined by the stem they attach to. There are twoarchiphoneme vowelsI (an underlyingly high vowel) andA (an underlyingly low vowel).
Yakut vowel harmony
Category
Final vowel in stem
Suffix vowels
Unrounded, back
a, aa, ï, ïï, ïa
a, aa, ï, ïï, ïa
Unrounded, front
e, ee, i, ii, ie
e, ee, i, ii, ie
Rounded back
u, uu, uo
a, aa, u, uu, uo
Rounded, front, close
ü, üü, üö
e, ee, ü, üü, üö
Rounded, back
o, oo
o, oo, u, uu, uo
Rounded, open, low
ö, öö
ö, öö, ü, üü, üö
Vowel harmony of archiphonemic vowels
Archiphonemic vowel
Preceding vowel
Front
Back
unrounded (i, ii, ie, e, ee)
rounded
unrounded (ï, ïï, ïa, a, aa)
rounded
high (ü, üü, üö)
low (ö, öö)
high (u, uu, uo)
low (o, oo)
I
i
ü
ï
u
A
e
ö
a
o
Examples ofI can be seen in the first-person singular possessive agreement suffix-(I)m:[27] as in (a):
After three earlier phases of development, Yakut is currently written using theCyrillic script: the modern Yakut alphabet, established in 1939 by theSoviet Union, consists of all theRussian characters with five additional letters forphonemes not present in Russian:Ҕҕ, Ҥҥ, Өө, Һһ, Үү, as follows:
Long vowels are represented through the doubling of vowels, e.g.үүт (üüt)/yːt/ 'milk', a practice that many scholars follow in romanizations of the language.[29][30][31]
The full Yakut alphabet contains letters for consonant phonemes not present in native words (and thus not indicated in the phonology tables above): the lettersВ/v/,Е /(j)e/,Ё /jo|/,Ж/ʒ/,З/z/,Ф/f/,Ц/t͡s/,Ш/ʃ/,Щ/ɕː/,Ъ,Ю /ju/,Я /ja/ are used exclusively in Russian loanwords. In addition, in native Yakut words, thesoft sign⟨Ь⟩ is used exclusively in the digraphs⟨дь⟩ and⟨нь⟩.
There are numerous conventions for the Romanization of Yakut. Bibliographic sources and libraries typically use theALA-LC Romanization tables for non-Slavic languages in Cyrillic script.[32] Linguists often employTurkological standards for transliteration,[33] or a mixture of Turkological standards and theIPA.[22] In addition, others employTurkish orthography.[34] Comparison of some of these systems can be seen in the following:
Although nouns have nogender, thepronoun systemdistinguishes between human and non-human in the third person, usingкини (kini, 'he/she') to refer to human beings andол (ol, 'it') to refer to all other things.[39]
Nouns have plural and singular forms. The plural is formed with the suffix /-LAr/, which may surface as-лар (-lar),-лэр (-ler),-лөр (-lör),-лор (-lor),-тар (-tar),-тэр (-ter),-төр (-tör),-тор (-tor),-дар (-dar),-дэр (-der),-дөр (-dör),-дор (-dor),-нар (-nar),-нэр (-ner),-нөр (-nör), or-нор (-nor), depending on the preceding consonants and vowels. The plural is used only when referring to a number of things collectively, not when specifying an amount. Nouns have nogender.
The wordкыргыттар, disregarding the composite-(ы)ттар plural suffix, has cognates in numerous Turkic languages, such asUzbek (qirqin 'bondwoman'),Bashkir, Tatar, Kyrgyz (кыз-кыркын 'girls'), Chuvash (хӑрхӑм), Turkmen (gyrnak) and extinct Qarakhanid, Khwarezmian and Chaghatay.
Only Sakha (Yakut) has a rich case system that differs markedly from all the otherSiberian Turkic languages. It has retained the ancient comitative case fromOld Turkic (due to strong influence fromMongolian) while in otherTurkic languages, the old comitative has become an instrumental case. However, in Sakha language the Old Turkic locative case has come to denote partitive case, thus leaving no case form for the function of locative. Instead, locative, dative and allative cases are realized through Common Turkic dative suffix:
A plant known among locals as "mountain cabbage" that grows on a mountain.
where-ҕа is dative andхайаҕа literally means "to the mountain". Furthermore, (in addition to locative,) genitive andequative cases are lost as well. Yakut has eightgrammatical cases:nominative (unmarked),accusative-(n)I,dative-GA,partitive-TA,ablative-(t)tan,instrumental-(I)nAn,comitative-LIIn, andcomparative-TAAɣAr.[40] Examples of these are shown in the following table for a vowel-final stemeye (of Mongolian origin) 'peace' and a consonant-final stemuot 'fire':
^Sakha partitive suffix is believed by some linguists to be an innovation stemming from the influence of Evenki which led the Old Turkic locative suffix to assume partitive function in Sakha; no other Turkic language has partitive suffix save forKhalaj and (nearly-extinct)Tofa.[41] Sakha partitive is similar to the correspondingFinnish partitive case.[42]
^The Ablative suffix appears as-TAn following a consonant and-TTAn following a vowel. Clear examples of the former areox 'arrow' →oxton 'from an/the arrow',oxtorton 'from (the) arrows'.
^Sakha is the only language within the Turkic family to have comparative case.
The partitive object case indicates that just a part of an object is affected, e.g.:
Note the word naːda is borrowed from Russian надо (must).
A notable detail about Yakut case is the absence of thegenitive,[43] a feature which some argue is due to historical contact withEvenki (aTungusic language), the language with which Sakha (i.e. Yakut) was in most intensive contact.[44] Possessors are unmarked, with the possessive relationship only being realized on the possessed noun itself either through thepossessive suffix[45] (if the subject is a pronoun) or through partitive case suffix (if the subject is any other nominal). For example, in (a) the first-person pronoun subjects are not marked for genitive case; neither do full nominal subjects (possessors) receive any marking, as shown in (b):
E. I. Korkina (1970) enumerates following tenses: present-future tense, future tense and eight forms of past tense (including imperfect). Sakha imperfect has two forms: analytic and synthetic. Both forms are based on the aorist suffix-Ar, common to all Turkic languages. The synthetic form, despite expressing a past aspect, lacks the Common Turkic past suffix, which is very unusual for a Turkic language. This is considered by some to be another influence from Even, a Tungusic language. Example:
Биһиги
иннибитинэ
бу
кыбартыыраҕа
оҕолоох
ыал
олорбуттар.
Биһиги иннибитинэ бу кыбартыыраҕа оҕолоох ыал олорбуттар.
Before us, a family with childrenused to live here.
Sakha, under Evenki/Even contact influence, has developed a distinction in imperative: immediate imperative ("do now!") and future/remote imperative ("do later!").[1]
Positive
Negative
Immediate
-∅/-(I)ŋ
-ma-∅/-ma-(I)ŋ
Remote
-A:r/-A:r-(I)ŋ
-(I)m-A:r/-(I)m-A:r-(I)ŋ
Immediate imperative example:
Николай
Атласов
алаадьыны
буһарыы
туһунан
кэпсиирин
истиҥ
Николай Атласов алаадьыны буһарыы туһунан кэпсииринистиҥ
Listen to Nikolay Atlasov’s talk about preparingoladyi.
Common Turkic has denominal suffix-LA, used to create verbs from nouns (i.e. Uzbektishla= 'to bite' fromtish 'tooth'). The suffix is also present in Sakha (in various shapes, due to vowel harmony), but Sakha takes it a step further: theoretically verbs can be created from any noun by attaching to that noun the denominal suffix:
Sakha converbs end in-(A)n as opposed to Common Turkic-(I)B. They express simultaneous and sequential action and are also used with auxiliary verbs, preceding them:
Күлүгүн
кытта
охсуһан
таҕыстыҥ
Күлүгүн кытта охсуһан таҕыстыҥ
You continuously fought with his shadow.
Simultaneous and sequential actions are expressed through the converbial suffix-а(н):
and the same sentence inUzbek (note the question suffix-mi in contrast to Sakha):
To’rg’ay jirini eshit(a)yapsanmi?
Question words in Yakut remain in-situ; they do notmove to the front of the sentence. Sample question words include:туох (tuox) 'what',ким (kim) 'who',хайдах (xajdax) 'how',хас (xas) 'how much; how many',ханна (xanna) 'where', andханнык (xannïk) 'which'.
The Yakut lexicon includes loans from Russian, Mongolic, Evenki, and number of words from other languages or of unknown origin. The Mongolic loans do not appear to be traceable to any specific Mongolic language, but a few have been traced toBuryat andKhalkha Mongolian. They are widely dispersed through various categories of words with words relating to the home and law having the most Mongolic loans. Russian loans on the contrary are much more widespread but less evenly dispersed though various types of words. Words relating to the modern world, clothing, and the home have the most Russian influence.[46]
The Yakut have a tradition of oral epic in their language called Олоҥхо ("Olonkho"), traditionally performed by skilled performers. The subject matter is based on Yakut mythology and legends. Versions of many Olonkho poems have been written down and translated since the 19th century, but only a very few older performers of the oral Olonkho tradition are still alive. They have begun a program to teach young people to sing this in their language and revive it, though in a modified form.[47]
Probably the first-ever Islamic book in Sakha language, "Билсиҥ: Ислам" ("Get to know: Islam"), written by a Sakha convert born in the village ofAsyma, was published in 2012.[50] This short book (52 pages) is intended to be a condensed introduction to the fundamentals of Islam in Sakha. The author occasionally employs native terms (which are also used inOlonkho corpus) to render some Islamic concepts, such as thejinn.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
^Robin Harris. 2012.Sitting "under the mouth": decline and revitalization in the Sakha epic tradition "Olonkho". Doctoral dissertation, University of Georgia.
Anderson, Gregory D. S. (1998). "Historical Aspects of Yakut (Saxa) Phonology".Turkic Languages.2 (2):1–32.
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Baker, Mark C; Vinokurova, Nadya (2010). "Two modalities of case assignment: case in Sakha".Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.28 (3):593–642.doi:10.1007/s11049-010-9105-1.S2CID18614663.
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Kirişçioğlu, M. Fatih (1999).Saha (Yakut) Türkçesi Grameri (in Turkish). Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu.ISBN975-16-0587-3.
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Robbeets, Martine; Savalyev, Alexander (2020). "Romanization Conventions". In Robbeets, Martine; Savalyev, Alexander (eds.).The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages. Oxford University Press. pp. lii–lxxxii.
Pakendorf, Brigitte (2007).Contact in the prehistory of the Sakha (Yakuts): Linguistic and genetic perspectives (Thesis). Universiteit Leiden.
Pakendorf, Brigitte; Stapert, Eugénie (2020). "Sakha and Dolgan, the North Siberian Turkic Languages". In Robbeets, Martine; Savalyev, Alexander (eds.).The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages. Oxford University Press. pp. 430–45.doi:10.1093/oso/9780198804628.003.0027.ISBN978-0-19-880462-8.
Petrova, Nyurguyana (2011).Lexicon and Clause-Linkage Properties of the Converbal Constructions in Sakha (Yakut) (Thesis). University of Buffalo.
Stachowski, Marek; Menz, Astrid (1998). "Yakut". In Johanson, Lars; Csató, Éva Á. (eds.).The Turkic Languages. Routledge.
1These are traditional areas of settlement; the Turkic group has been living in the listed country/region for centuries and should not be confused with modern diasporas. 2State with limited international recognition.
