Bashkir or Bashkort is a Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak branch. It is co-official with Russian in Bashkortostan. It is spoken by around 750,000 native speakers in Russia, as well as in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other neighboring post-Soviet states, and among the Bashkir diaspora. It has three dialect groups: Southern, Eastern and Northwestern.

Speakers

Speakers of Bashkir mostly live in the republic of Bashkortostan (a republic within the Russian Federation). Many speakers also live in Tatarstan, Chelyabinsk, Orenburg, Tyumen, Sverdlovsk and Kurgan Oblasts and other regions of Russia. Minor Bashkir groups also live in Kazakhstan and the United States. In a recent local media report in Bashkortostan, it was reported that some officials of the republic cannot assemble a document in Bashkir language.

Classification

Bashkir together with Tatar belongs to the Kipchak-Bulgar subgroup of the Kipchak languages. These languages have a similar vocabulary by 94.9%, and they not only have common origin, but also a common ancestor in the written language — Volga Turki. However, Bashkir differs from Tatar in several important ways: The Bashkir orthography is more explicit. and are written with their own letters Ҡ ҡ and Ғ ғ, whereas in Tatar they are treated as positional allophones of and, written К к and Г г. Labial vowel harmony in Bashkir is written explicitly, e.g. Tatar тормышым tormışım and Bashkir тормошом – tormoşom, both pronounced, meaning "my life".

Sample text

Orthography

After the adoption of Islam, which began in the 10th century and lasted for several centuries, the Bashkirs began to use Turki as a written language. Turki was written in a variant of the Arabic script. In 1923, a writing system based on the Arabic script was specifically created for the Bashkir language. At the same time, the Bashkir literary language was created, moving away from the older written Turkic influences. At first, it used a modified Arabic alphabet. In 1930 it was replaced with the Unified Turkic Latin Alphabet, which was in turn replaced with an adapted Cyrillic alphabet in 1939. The modern alphabet used by Bashkir is based on the Russian alphabet, with the addition of the following letters: Ә|Ә ә, Ө|Ө ө , Ү|Ү ү , Ғ|Ғ ғ , Ҡ|Ҡ ҡ , Ң|Ң ң , Ҙ|Ҙ ҙ , Ҫ|Ҫ ҫ , Һ|Һ һ.

Phonology

Vowels

Bashkir has nine native vowels, and three or four loaned vowels (mainly in Russian loanwords). Phonetically, the native vowels are approximately thus (with the Cyrillic letter followed by the usual Latin romanization in angle brackets): In Russian loans there are also, , and , written the same as the native vowels: ы, е/э, о, а respectively.

Historical shifts

Historically, the Proto-Turkic mid vowels have raised from mid to high, whereas the Proto-Turkic high vowels have become the Bashkir reduced mid series. (The same shifts have also happened in Tatar.) However, in most dialects of Bashkir, this shift is not as prominent as in Tatar.

Consonants

Grammar

A member of the Turkic language family, Bashkir is an agglutinative, SOV language. A large part of the Bashkir vocabulary has Turkic roots; and there are many loan words in Bashkir from Russian, Arabic and Persian sources.

Plurality

The form of the plural suffix is heavily dependent on the letter which comes immediately before it. When it's a consonant, there is a four-way distinction between "л" (l), "т" (t), "ҙ" (ź) and "д" (d); The vowel's distinction is two-way between "а" (after back vowels "а" (a), "ы" (ı), "о" (o), "у" (u)) and "ә" (after front vowels "ә" (ə), "е" (e), "и" (i), "ө" (ö), "ү" (ü)). Some nouns are also less likely to be used with their plural forms such as "һыу" (hıw, "water") or "ҡом" (qom, "sand").

Declension table