Yakut , also known as Yakutian, Sakha, Saqa or Saxa (), is a Turkic language belonging to Siberian Turkic branch and spoken by around 450,000 native speakers, primarily the ethnic Yakuts and one of the official languages of Sakha (Yakutia), a federal republic in the Russian Federation.
The Yakut language differs from all other Turkic languages in the presence of a layer of vocabulary of unclear origin (possibly Paleo-Siberian). There is also a large number of words of Mongolian origin related to ancient borrowings, as well as numerous recent borrowings from Russian. Like other Turkic languages and their ancestor Proto-Turkic, Yakut is an agglutinative language and features vowel harmony.
Classification
Yakut is a member of the Northeastern Common Turkic family of languages, which also includes Shor, Tuvan and Dolgan. Like most Turkic languages, Yakut has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. Word order is usually subject–object–verb. Yakut has been influenced by Tungusic and Mongolian languages.
Historically, Yakut left the community of Common Turkic speakers relatively early. Due to this, it diverges in many ways from other Turkic languages and mutual intelligibility between Yakut and other Turkic languages is low. Nevertheless, Yakut contains many features which are important for the reconstruction of Proto-Turkic, such as the preservation of long vowels.
Geographic distribution
Yakut is spoken mainly in the Sakha Republic. It is also used by ethnic Yakuts 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 Yakut, which formerly was considered by some a dialect of Yakut, is spoken by Dolgans in Krasnoyarsk Region. Yakut 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 the Yakut language during the 2002 census.
Phonology
Consonants
Yakut has the following consonants phonemes, where the IPA value is provided in slashes '//' and the native script value is provided in bold followed by the romanization in parentheses.
are laminal denti-alveolar , whereas are alveolar . The nasal glide is not distinguished from in the orthography, where both are written as . Thus айыы can be ayïï 'deed, creation, work' or aỹïï 'sin, transgression.' The nasal glide has a very restricted distribution, appearing in very few words. is pronounced as a flap between vowels, e.g. орон (oron) 'place', and as a trill at the end of words, e.g. тур (tur) 'stand'. does not occur at the beginning of words in native Yakut words; borrowed Russian words with onset are usually rendered with an epenthetic vowel, e.g. Russian рама (rama) > Yakut араама (araama) 'frame'.
Yakut is in many ways phonologically unique among the Turkic languages. Yakut and the closely related Dolgan language are the only Turkic languages without hushing sibilants. Additionally, no known Turkic languages other than Yakut and Khorasani Turkic have the palatal nasal .
Consonant assimilation
Consonants at morpheme boundaries undergo extensive assimilation, both progressive and regressive. All suffixes possess numerous allomorphs. For suffixes which begin with a consonant, the surface form of the consonant is conditioned on the stem-final segment. There are four such archiphonemic consonants: G, B, T, and L. Examples of each are provided in the following table for the suffixes -GIt (second-person plural possessive suffix, oɣoɣut 'your [pl.] child'), -BIt (first-person plural possessive suffix, oɣobut, 'our child'), -TA (partitive case suffix, 'some teeth'), -LARA (third-person plural possessive suffix, oɣoloro 'their child'). Note that the alternation in the vowels is governed by vowel harmony (see the main article and the below section).
There is an additional regular morphophonological pattern for -final stems: they assimilate in place of articulation with an immediately following labial or velar. For example at 'horse' > akkït 'your [pl.] horse', > appït 'our horse'.