Karakalpak language

Karakalpak
Qaraqalpaq tili, Қарақалпақ тили
Spoken in
Region	Karakalpakstan
Total speakers	412,000 (1993)
Language family	Altaic Turkic Kypchak Kypchak-Nogay Karakalpak
Official status
Official language in	Uzbekistan (Karakalpakstan is the official area)
Regulated by	No official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1	None
ISO 639-2	kaa
ISO 639-3	kaa
Linguasphere
Map showing locations of Karakalpak (red) within Uzbekistan
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Karakalpak is a Turkic language mainly spoken by Karakalpaks in Karakalpakstan (Uzbekistan), as well as by Bashkirs and Nogay. Ethnic Karakalpaks who live in the viloyatlar of Uzbekistan tend to speak local Uzbek dialects.

Classification

Karakalpak is a member of the Kypchak Turkic family of languages, which includes Tatar, Kumyk and Kazakh. The Kipchak family is a subgroup of the Turkic languages, which most linguists believe to be member of an Altaic language family. Within the Kypchak Turkic family, Karakalpak is most closely related to Kazakh and Nogai. Due to its proximity to the Uzbek language areal, much of the vocabulary and grammar has an Uzbek influence.

Like Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish, Karakalpak has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. Word order is usually Subject Object Verb.

Geographic Distribution

Karakalpak is spoken mainly in the Karakalpakstan Autonomous Republic of Uzbekistan. Approximately 2,000 people in Afghanistan speak Karakalpak and smaller diaspora in other parts of Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and other parts of the world speak Karakalpak as well. Some people hold that the Karakalpak language is in fact merely a dialect of the Kazakh language with some minor local vocabulary; this is allegedly due to Stalin's policies of mixing the ethnic groups of Central Asia to ensure they could not unite and revolt against the Russians (another example is the large Uzbek minority in the Khojend region of Tajikistan).

Official Status

Karakalpak has official status in the Karakalpakstan Autonomous Republic.

Dialects

The Ethnologue identifies two dialects of Karakalpak: Northeastern and Southwestern. Menges mentions a third possible dialect spoken in the Fergana Valley. The Southwestern dialect has č for the Northeastern š.

Sounds

Karakalpak has 21 native consonant phonemes and regularly uses 4 non-native phonemes in loan words. Non-native sounds are shown in parentheses.

Karakalpak vowels

Vowel Harmony

Vowel harmony functions in Karakalpak much as it does in other Turkic languages. Words borrowed from Russian or other languages may not observe rules of vowel harmony, but the following rules usually apply:

Vocabulary

Personal Pronouns

men I, sen you (singular), ol he, she, it, that, biz we, siz you (plural), olar they

Numbers

bir 1, eki 2, u'sh 3, to'rt 4, bes 5, altı 6, jeti 7, segiz 8, tog'ıs 9, on 10, ju'z 100, mın' 1000

Writing system

Karakalpak was written in the Arabic alphabet and in Persian until 1928, in the Latin alphabet (with additional characters) from 1928 to 1940, after which the Cyrillic alphabet was introduced. Following Uzbek independence in 1991 the decision was made to drop Cyrillic and to revert to the Latin alphabet. Whilst the use of Latin script is now widespread in Tashkent, its introduction into Karakalpakstan remains gradual. The Cyrillic and Latin alphabets are shown below with their equivalent representations in the IPA. Cyrillic letters with no representation in the Latin alphabet are marked with asterisks.

March 2006. A photo laboratory in Nukus - with the signboard in Latin letters Karakalpak language

References

Menges, Karl H. (1947). Qaraqałpaq Grammar. Morningside Heights, New York: King's Crown Press. 

Johanson, Lars and Csató, Éva Ágnes (1998). The Turkic Languages. London: Routledge. 

External links

• Ethnologue report for Karakalpak
• Karakalpak-English dictionary