Tatar Language

Tatar Alphabet by Mardesign

Tatar language is spoken by Tatar people and belongs to the Kipchak brunch of the Turkic languages family. Like all Turkic languages, Tatar is characterized by vowel harmony and  agglutinative nature of grammatical relations between the words.

For many centuries, Tatar language has been instrumental in connecting various Turkic people to carry on businesses and innovations. It has served as an intermediary between Turkic languages-speaking people populating EurAsian continent and has been promoting successful collaborations and opportunities. Based on the lexicostatistical matrix of Turkic languages and according to the to recent article in Journal of Language Evolution, Tatar language exhibits more than 50% of basic lexical similarities with at least 12 Turkic languages (Azeri, Bashkir, Crimean Tatars, Kazakh, Karachi, Khakas, Kyrgyz, Turkish, Turkmen, Tuvan, Uyghur, Uzbek). Tatar language has several dialects (Volga/Kazan, Astrakhan, Siberian, Mishar). Crimean Tatar language is much closer grammatically, phonetically and lexically to Turkish language than to literary (Volga) Tatar language. The modern written Tatar language is based on the Cyrillic script since 1938. Prior to that, it was Latin (1927-38), Arabic scripts- and Turkic runes- based.

There are between 2-5 million Tatar language speakers worldwide with most of them residing in the indigenous lands that are part of the Russian Federation. The number of Tatar language speakers has been rapidly declining due to minority status, urbanisation, assimilation and popularity of English and Russian languages as lingua franca. Resources and efforts for Tatar language instructions are becoming limited. It is essential these days to take efforts to keep ancestral language utilized, as a heritage language is the most critical marker of the health of the community and versatility of the world. It is important for Tatar language – as well as for any other endangered languages – to have opportunities and supportive environment to be unitilized.

Join the community of Tatar speakers! Consider introducing yourself to Tatar language and culture to broaden your horizons!

Take 8 weeks Tatar Language and Culture exploration course. It will be taught this summer (May 30-July 14, 2023) at Arizona State University and online. Anyone who applies by January 27 is eligible for scholarship. Take a dive to learn a new minority language: https://melikian.asu.edu/cli/tatar!

If you cannot make it to Arizona State University or have other things to do this summer, then check out some resources available all year around online.

Learn

Read, Listen, Watch

Listen to Tatar Music

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

One comment on “Tatar Language

  1. Pingback: Dirt or Snow, Tatar Boots are to glow! | Unique Leather Mosaic

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s