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Yakutian
Sakha tyla
? ?, saxa t?la
Pronunciation	[saxa t?la]
Native to	Russia
Region	Yakutia
Ethnicity	Yakuts (2010 census)
Native speakers	450,000 [1] (2010 census)
Language family	Turkic Common Turkic Siberian Northern Yakutian
Writing system	Cyrillic
Official status
Official language in	Russia  Yakutia
Language codes
	sah
	sah
Glottolog	yaku1245
Sakha language   Dolgan language
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Yakut,^[2][3] also known as Yakutian, Sakha, Saqa or Saxa, is a Turkic language with around 450,000 native speakers spoken in Sakha (Yakutia), a federal republic in the Russian Federation, by the Yakuts.

The Yakut language differs from all other Turkic languages in the presence of a layer of vocabulary of unclear origin (possibly Paleo-Asian). There are also a large number of words of Mongolian origin related to ancient borrowings, as well as numerous recent borrowings from Russian. Like most Turkic languages and their ancestor Proto-Turkic, Yakut is an agglutinative language and employs vowel harmony.

Classification

Yakut is a member of the Northeastern Common Turkic family of languages, which includes Shor, Tuvan and Dolgan in addition to Yakut. Like most Turkic languages, Yakut has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. Word order is usually subject-object-verb. Yakut has been influenced by Tungusic and Mongolian languages.^[4]

Geographic distribution

Yakut is spoken mainly in the Sakha Republic. It is also used by ethnic Yakuts in Khabarovsk Region and a small diaspora in other parts of the Russian Federation, Turkey, and other parts of the world. Dolgan, a close relative of Yakut, considered by some^[who?] a dialect, is spoken by Dolgans in Krasnoyarsk Region. Yakut is widely used as a lingua franca by other ethnic minorities in the Sakha Republic - more Dolgans, Evenks, Evens and Yukagirs 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 the 2002 census.^[5]

Phonology

One characteristic feature of Yakut is vowel harmony. For example, if the first vowel of a Yakut word is a front vowel, the second and other vowels of the same word are usually the same vowel or another front vowel: (kelin) "back": ? (e) is open unrounded front, ? (i) is close unrounded front. Yakut initial s- corresponds to initial h- in Dolgan and played an important operative rule in the development of proto-Yakut, ultimately resulting in initial Ø- < *h- < *s- (example: Dolgan huoq and Yakut suox, both meaning "not"). The hypothetical change of *s > h (debuccalization) is well known and is far from unusual, being characteristic of such languages 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. ^[6]

Consonants

*In dialects spoken in the northern districts of Yakutia, the letter ? is pronounced as when it is at the beginning of a word and the letter is pronounced as when it stands after ? within a word. This feature likely exists as a result of influence by the Yukaghir languages and/or Tungusic languages.

Sakha language (expect of Dolgan language) is the only Turkic language without hushing sibilants. Also, Sakha and Khorasani Turkic are the only known Turkic languages with voiced palatal nasal .

Vowels

Orthography

Yakut is written using the Cyrillic script: the modern Yakut alphabet, established in 1939 by the Soviet Union, consists of the usual Russian characters but with five additional letters?, , , , .

The language has a highly phonemic orthography except for some dialects. While ? may be pronounced as or depending on the word, the distinction is not as relevant nowadays.

Yakut alphabet (Saxal suruk-biçik):

Grammar

Syntax

The typical word order can be summarized as subject - adverb - object - verb; possessor - possessed; noun - adjective.

Nouns

Nouns have plural and singular forms. The plural is formed with the suffix /-LAr/, which may surface as - (-lar), - (-ler), - (-lör), - (-lor), - (-tar), - (-ter), - (-tör), - (-tor), - (-dar), - (-der), - (-dör), - (-dor), - (-nar), - (-ner), - (-nör), or - (-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 no gender.

Notes

* Nouns can also be adjectives, which also have plural forms. So, for example, is big and is bigs or correctly they are big.

There are exceptions: (boy) -- (boys) and ? (girl) -- (girls).

Pronouns

Personal pronouns in Yakut distinguish between first, second, and third persons and singular and plural number.

Although nouns have no gender, the pronoun system distinguishes between human and non-human in the third person, using ? (kini, 'he/she') to refer to human beings and (ol, 'it') to refer to all other things.^[8]

Questions

Question words in Yakut remain in-situ; they do not move to the front of the sentence. Sample question words include: ? (tuox) "what", (kim) "who", (xaydax) "how", (xas) "how much", (xanna) "where", and (xann?k) "which".

Vocabulary

Numbers

In this table, the Yakut numbers are written in Latin transcription (see Writing system).

Literature

The first printing in Yakut was a part of a book by Nicolaas Witsen published in 1692 in Amsterdam.^[9]

In 2005, Marianne Beerle-Moor, director of the Institute for Bible Translation, Russia/CIS, was awarded the Order of Civil Valour by the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) for the translation of the New Testament into Yakut.^[10]

Oral traditions

The Yakut have a tradition of oral epic in their language called "Olonkho", traditionally performed by skilled performers. Only a very few older performers of this 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.^[11]

Examples

Article 1 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Novgorodov's alphabet 1920-1929. (Latin alphabet/IPA)	n bar?ta beje sltat?gar nna b?ra:b?gar te? blan try:ler. kiniler bar? rk:n jd:q, sbasta:q blan try:ler, nna beje bejeliger t?lga ki:riniges b?h?:lara drd?hu t?:nn?:q blqta:q.
Latin alphabet 1929--1939. (Yañalif)	Çon ?ar?ta ?eje suoltat?gar uonna raagar te? ?uolan t?ryyler. Kiniler ?ar? ?rkn ?jdq, suo?astaaq ?uolan t?ryyler, uonna ?eje ?ejeliger t?lga kiiriniges hlara do?ordohu tnnaaq ?uoluoqtaaq.
Modern Cyrillic 1939--present.	? ? ? . ? ? , ? , ? ? .
English	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.

See also

• Yakuts
• Dolgan language
• Semyon Novgorodov - the inventor of the first IPA-based Yakut alphabet

References

External links

Language-related

• Yakut Vocabulary List (from the World Loanword Database)
• Yakut thematic vocabulary lists
• [3]
• Comparison of Yakut and Mongolian vocabulary
• Yakut texts with Russian translations in the Internet Archive - heroic poetry, fairy tales, legends, proverbs, etc.
• Sakhalyy suruk - Yakut Unicode fonts and Keyboard Layouts for PC
• Sakhatyla.ru - On-line Yakut-Russian, Russian-Yakut dictionary
• Yakut-English Dictionary
• BGN/PCGN romanization tool for Yakut
• Sakha Open World - mp3's of Sakha Radio

Content in Yakut

• Sakha Open World - ? - A platform to promote the Yakut Language on the web; News, Lyrics, Music, Fonts, Forum, VideoNews (in Yakut, Unicode)
• Baayaga village website - news and stories about and by the people of Baayaga (in Yakut)
• Kyym.ru - site of Yakut newspaper