Tatar language

Tatar (Tatar tele/Tatarça)
Spoken in:	Idel-Ural, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, China, Finland, former Soviet Union
Region:	Eastern Europe, Central Asia
Total speakers:	8 million
Ranking:	95
Genetic classification:	Altaic languages Turkic languages Northwestern (Qypchaq-Bolghar) Uralian Tatar
Official status
Official language of:	Tatarstan
Regulated by:	-
Language codes
ISO 639-1	tt
ISO 639-2	tat
SIL	TTR

The Tatar language (Tatar tele, Tatarça) is a very ancient Turkic language belonging to the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic family of languages.

It is the official language of the Republic of Tatarstan, and is also spoken in Siberia as well as in China, Turkey, Ukraine, Finland, Estonia, and all over Central Asia.

With a few exceptions, the main features which distinguish the Altaic languages from Indo-European are as follows:

• Vowel harmony is a feature of all Ural-Altaic tongues
• No gender
• Agglutination
• Verbs come at the end of the sentence

Kazan Tatar language's ancestors are the extinct Bolgar and Kipchak languages.

Other European (see also: Crimean Tatar), Caucasus, and West Siberian Tatar languages are very similar to the Kazan Tatar language and are mutually intelligible with it.

The literary Tatar language is based on the Kazan Tatar language's Middle (Tatarstan) dialect and the Old Tatar Language (İske Tatar Tele). The Old Tatar language's ancestors are the Volga Bolgar language and Kipchak.

Kazan Tatar language is also native for 400,000 Bashkirs, especially those living in Ufa, and some thousands of Maris. Mordva's Qaratay group also speak Tatar. The Tatar language is an international communication language beetwen Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvashs, Kazakhs, Maris, Mordvins, and Udmurts.

The Tatar language strongly influenced on most of the Caucasian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Finnic languages in the Volga River area.

Difficulties of Tatar pronunciation

• Natively Tatar words do not have the following consonants: [Z] (j), [f] and [v], but they are prounounced by Tatars well

• Kazan Tatars can not pronounce affricates at all. Mostly they pronounce Tatar [ʃ] (soft Esh) or instead of [ʧ] (Tesh), [ʒ] (Ezh) instead of [ʤ] (Dezh), [s] instead of [ts].

• There are only 4 type syllables: c – consonant, v - vowel
  • c+v
  • v+c
  • c+v+c
  • c+v+c+c

• If there are more than 2 consonants, ı or e sounds are inserted into the speech. Sometimes this process occurs in non-Tatar words without any reason.

tekst (text) -> [tekest] bank -> [banık] (not [bañk])

• There are 5 pairs of vowels: a - ä, o - ö, u - ü, ı - e, í - i

• In the end of syllable without vowel after the last consonant:

b -> [p], g ->[k], ğ -> [q] or [x], v ->[f] tabíb (doctor) -> [tabíp]

• The Tatar language has vowel harmony

• For more about Tatar phonetic see Tatar alphabet

Dialects of Kazan Tatar language

In Western (Mişär) dialect Ç is prnounced as [tS], C as [dZ], [ts] sound also pronounced.

In Minzälä subdialect of Central Dialect [ð] is pronounced in some cases.

In come cases Y is pronounced as C before the consonate in all regions of Tatarstan.

In bilingually peoples' city slang differences between x and h, q and k, ğ and g, v and w is not so principial as it was earlier. This is harmful influence of Cyrillic alphabet.

See also

• Tatars
• Tatar alphabet