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Yakut language |
| Sakha Саха тыла Saxa tyla |
||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Russia | |
| Region: | Sakha | |
| Total speakers: | 456,288 (2002 census)1 | |
| Language family: | Altaic2 (controversial) Turkic Northern Turkic Sakha |
|
| Writing system: | Cyrillic alphabet | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language in: | Sakha Republic | |
| Regulated by: | no official regulation | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | sah | |
| ISO 639-3: | sah | |
 |
||
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Sakha, or Yakut, is a Turkic language with around 460,000 speakers spoken in the Sakha Republic in the Russian Federation by the Sakha or Yakuts.
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Sakha is a member of the Northern Turkic family of languages, which includes Shor, Tuvan, and Dolgan in addition to Sakha. The Northern Turkic family is a subgroup of the Turkic languages, which some linguists believe to be member of the disputed Altaic language family. 3
Like Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish, Sakha has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. Word order is usually Subject Object Verb.
Sakha is spoken mainly in the Sakha Republic. It is also used by ethnic Sakha 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 Sakha, considered by some a dialect, is spoken by Dolgans in Krasnoyarsk Region. Sakha 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 Yakut language during the 2002 census.4
One characteristic feature of Sakha is vowel harmony. For example, if the first vowel of a Sakha word is a front vowel, the second and other vowels of the same word are usually the same vowel or another front vowel: кэлин (kelin) "back": э (e) is open unrounded front, и (i) is close unrounded front.
| Bilabial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives | p | b | t | d | c | ɟ | k | ɡ | ||||
| Nasals | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||||||||
| Fricatives | s | x | ɣ | h | ||||||||
| Tap | ɾ | |||||||||||
| Approximant | j, j̃ | |||||||||||
| Lateral approximants |
l | |||||||||||
| Short | Long | Diphthong | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Close | Open | Close | Open | |||
| Front | Unrounded | i | e | iː | eː | ie |
| Rounded | y | ø | yː | øː | yø | |
| Back | Unrounded | ɯ | a | ɯː | aː | ɯa |
| Rounded | u | o | uː | oː | uo | |
Sakha is written using the Cyrillic script: the modern Sakha alphabet, established in 1939 by the Soviet Union, consists of the usual Russian characters but with 5 additional letters: Ҕҕ, Ҥҥ, Өө, Һһ, Үү.
Сахалыы сурук-бичигэ
| Cyrillic | Name | IPA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| А а | /a/ | ||
| Б б | /b/ | ||
| В в | /v/ | found only in Russian loanwords 3 | |
| Г г | /ɡ/ | ||
| Ҕ ҕ | /ɣ, ʁ/ | ||
| Д д | /d/ | ||
| Дь дь | /ɟ/ | ||
| Е е | /e, je/ | found only in Russian loanwords | |
| Ё ё | /jo/ | found only in Russian loanwords | |
| Ж ж | /ʒ/ | found only in Russian loanwords | |
| З з | /z/ | found only in Russian loanwords | |
| И и | /i/ | ||
| Й й | йот | /j, j̃/ | Nasalization of the glide is not indicated in the orthography |
| К к | /k, q/ | ||
| Л л | /l/ | ||
| М м | /m/ | ||
| Н н | /n/ | ||
| Ҥ ҥ | /ŋ/ | ||
| Нь нь | /ɲ/ | ||
| О о | /o/ | ||
| Ө ө | /ø/ | ||
| П п | /p/ | ||
| Р р | /ɾ/ | ||
| С с | /s/ | ||
| Һ һ | ha | /h/ | |
| Т т | /t/ | ||
| У у | /u/ | ||
| Ү ү | /y/ | ||
| Ф ф | /f/ | found only in Russian loanwords | |
| Х х | ха | /x/ | |
| Ц ц | /ʦ/ | found only in Russian loanwords | |
| Ч ч | /c/ | ||
| Ш ш | /ʃ/ | found only in Russian loanwords | |
| Щ щ | /ɕː/ | found only in Russian loanwords | |
| Ъ ъ | кытаатыннарар бэлиэ | /◌./ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| Ы ы | /ɯ/ | ||
| Ь ь | сымнатыы бэлиэтэ | /◌ʲ/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
| Э э | /e/ | ||
| Ю ю | /ju/ | found only in Russian loanwords | |
| Я я | /ja/ | found only in Russian loanwords |
The typical word order can be summarized as subject adverb - object - verb; possessor - possessed; noun - adjective.
Nouns have plural and singular forms. The plural is formed with the suffix /-LAr/, which may surface as [-лар (-lar)], [-лэр (-ler)], [-лөр (-lør)], [-лор (-lor)], [-тар (-tar)], [-тэр (-ter)], [-төр (-tør)], [-тор (-tor)], [-дар (-dar)], [-дэр (-der)], [-дөр (-dør)], [-дор (-dor)], [-нар (-nar)], [-нэр (-ner)], [-нөр (-nør)], 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 no gender, but the pronoun system distinguishes between human and non-human in the third person, using кини (kini) to refer to human beings and ол (ol) to refer to all other things. 5
Personal pronouns in Sakha distinguish between first, second, and third persons and singular and plural number.
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | мин (min) | биһиги (bihigi) |
| 2nd | эн (en) | эһиги (ehigi) |
| 3rd | кини (kini) | кинилэр (kiniler) |
Question words in Sakha remain in-situ; they do not move to the front of the sentence. Sample question words include: туох (tuox) "what", ким (kim) "who", хайдах (xaydax) "how", хас (xas) "how much", ханна (xanna) "where", and ханнык (xannɯk) "which".
The first printing in Yakut was a part of a Nicolaas Witsen's book published in 1692 in Amsterdam.
In 2005, Marianne Beerle-Moor, director of the Institute for Bible Translation, Russia/CIS, was awarded the “Civil Valour” Order for ... the translation of the New Testament into the Yakut language.6
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