Crimean Tatar language

Crimean Tatar
Qırım / Qırımtatar tili
Pronunciation	[qɯˈrɯm tiˈli]
Spoken in
Region	Black Sea
Total speakers	483,990[1]
Language family	Altaic[2] (controversial) Turkic Kypchak/Oghuz Crimean Tatar
Official status
Official language in	None
Recognised minority language in	Ukraine (Crimea)  Romania (Dobroudja)
Regulated by	No official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1	None
ISO 639-2	crh
ISO 639-3	crh
Linguasphere
Crimean Tatar-speaking world
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

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History
Khanate (1441–1783) Taurida Oblast (1783–1796) Taurida Governorate (1802–1917) People's Republic (1917–1918) Crimean ASSR (1921–1945) Sürgün (1944) Crimean Oblast (1945–1991) Autonomous Republic (since 1992)
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Famous Crimean Tatars Khans · Mejlis · Milliy Firqa

The Crimean Tatar language (Qırımtatar tili, Qırımtatarca), also known as Crimean (Qırım tili, Qırımca) and Crimean Turkish (Qırım Türkçesi) is the language of the Crimean Tatars. It is a Turkic language spoken in Crimea, Central Asia (mainly in Uzbekistan), and the Crimean Tatar diasporas in Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria. It is not to be confused with the Tatar language.

Number of speakers

Today, more than 260,000 Crimean Tatars live in Crimea, and approximately 150,000 are still in exile in Central Asia (mainly in Uzbekistan). An estimated 5 million people of Crimean origin live in Turkey, descendants of those who emigrated in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Smaller Crimean Tatar communities are also found in Romania (24,000), Bulgaria (3,000), Poland, Finland, and the United States. It is one of the seriously endangered languages in Europe.^[3]

Dialects

Each of the three subethnic groups of the Crimean Tatars has its own dialect. The dialect of the Noğays - the former inhabitants of the Crimean steppe (should not be confused with Nogai people) - is of Kypchak origin, Yalıboylus, who lived on the southern coast of Crimea before 1944, speak an Oghuz dialect very close to Turkish, and the middle dialect of the Tat Tatars from the Crimean Mountains (should not be confused with Tat people) is a mixture of the two. This dialect is a direct descendant of the Cuman language, but it has been strongly influenced by the Oghuz Turkic. The modern Crimean Tatar written language is based on this middle dialect because the Tats comprise about 55% of the total Crimean Tatar population and their dialect is equally intelligible to the speakers of the others.

History

The forming of the Crimean Tatar spoken dialects began with the first Turkic invasions to Crimea and ended during the period of the Crimean Khanate. However, the official written languages of the Crimean Khanate were Chagatai and Ottoman Turkish. After the Islamization, Crimean Tatars wrote with an Arabic script.

In 1876, the different Turkish Crimean dialects were made into a uniform written language by İsmail Gaspıralı. A preference was given to the Oghuz dialect of the Yalıboylus not to break the link between the Crimeans and the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. In 1928, it was reoriented to the middle dialect.

In 1928, the alphabet was replaced with the Uniform Turkic Alphabet based on the Latin alphabet. The Uniform Turkic Alphabet was itself replaced in 1938 by a modified Cyrillic alphabet. Since 1990s, the script is in the process of being replaced with a Latin version again, but the Cyrillic is still widely used (mainly in published literature and newspapers). The current Latin-based Crimean Tatar alphabet is the same as the Turkish alphabet with two additional characters: Ñ ñ and Q q.

Crimean Tatar was the native language of the poet Bekir Çoban-zade.

Current situation

According to the constitution of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, as published in Russian by its Verkhovna Rada (see Конституция Автономной Республики Крым), Russian and Crimean Tatar languages enjoy a "protected" (Russian - обеспечивается ... защита) status; every citizen is entitled, at his request (Russian ходатайство), to receive government documents, such as "Passport, Birth certificate and others" in Crimean Tatar. According to the constitution of Ukraine, however, Ukrainian is the only official language in all of Ukraine, so the recognition of those languages is a matter of political and legal debate.

Before the Sürgün, the deportation of Crimean Tatars to the Uzbek SSR (18 May 1944), it had an official language status in the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

Writing systems

Crimean Tatar Latin alphabet

 â symbol is not considered to be a separate letter.

Crimean Tatar Cyrillic alphabet

гъ, къ, нъ and дж are separate letters.

Crimean Tatar in comparison with other languages

Crimean Tatar and Turkish

The following newspaper report compares the Crimean Tatar and Turkish languages:

Crimean Tatar and Tatar

Because of its common name, Crimean Tatar is sometimes mistaken to be a dialect of the Tatar language. Although these languages are related (as both are Turkic), the Kypchak languages closest to Crimean Tatar are (as was mentioned above) Kumyk and Karachay-Balkar, not the Tatar language.

References

Bibliography

• Árpád Berta. 1998. "West Kipchak Languages," The Turkic Languages. Ed. Lars Johanson & Éva Ágnes Csató. Routledge Language Family Descriptions. Routledge. Pp. 301–317.

External links

• Wiktionary's category of Crimean Tatar words
• Linguistic corpus of Crimean Tatar language
• Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People
• Kırımtatar Dili (Turkish)
• Wiktionary's category of Crimean Tatar words (Turkish)
• Crimean Tatar internet library
• Automatic Latin<>Cyrillic transliterator for Crimean Tatar texts

Dictionaries

• Online Crimean Tatar-Russian Dictionary
• Online Crimean Tatar (Northern dialect) -Turkish-English Dictionary tatarcasozluk.com