Bashkir language
Bashkir (; Bashkir: "Bashqortsa", "Bashqort tele", ) is a Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak branch. It is co-official with Russian in Bashkortostan. It is spoken by approximately 1.4 million native speakers in Russia, as well as in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Estonia and other neighboring post-Soviet states, and among the Bashkir diaspora. It has three dialect groups: Southern, Eastern and Northwestern. Speakers. Speakers of Bashkir mostly live in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan. Many speakers also live in Tatarstan, Chelyabinsk, Orenburg, Tyumen, Sverdlovsk and Kurgan Oblasts and other regions of Russia. Minor Bashkir groups also live in  Kazakhstan and other countries. Classification. Bashkir together with Tatar belongs to the Bulgaric () subgroups of the Kipchak languages. They both share the same vocalism and the vowel shifts (see below) that make both the languages stand apart from most other Kipchak and Oghuz Turkic languages. However, Bashkir differs from Tatar in several important ways: The Bashkir orthography is more explicit. and are written with their own letters Ҡ ҡ and Ғ ғ, whereas in Tatar they are treated as positional allophones of and , written К к and Г г. Labial vowel harmony in Bashkir is written explicitly, e.g. Tatar тормышым  tormïshïm and Bashkir тормошом "tormoshom", both pronounced , meaning "my life". Orthography. After the adoption of Islam, which began in the 10th century and lasted for several centuries, the Bashkirs began to use Turki as a written language. Turki was written in a variant of the Arabic script. In 1923, a writing system based on the Arabic script was specifically created for the Bashkir language. At the same time, the Bashkir literary language was created, moving away from the older written Turkic influences. At first, it used a modified Arabic alphabet. In 1930 it was replaced with the Unified Turkic Latin  Alphabet, which was in turn replaced with an adapted Cyrillic alphabet in 1939. The modern alphabet used by Bashkir is based on the Russian alphabet, with the addition of the following letters: Ә ә , Ө ө , Ү ү , Ғ ғ , Ҡ ҡ , Ң ң , Ҙ ҙ , Ҫ ҫ , Һ һ . Phonology. Vowels. Bashkir has nine native vowels, and three or four loaned vowels (mainly in Russian loanwords). Phonetically, the native vowels are approximately thus (with the Cyrillic letter followed by the usual Latin romanization in angle brackets): The two mid unrounded vowels are always short, in an unstressed position they  are frequently elided, as in кеше "keshe" > 'person', or ҡышы "qïshï" > '(his) winter'. Low back is rounded in the first syllable and after , but not in the last, as in бала "bala" 'child', балаларға "balalargha" 'to children'. In Russian loans there are also , , and , written the same as the native vowels: ы, е/э, о, а respectively. The mid vowels may be transcribed as lowered near-high [, , , ], and the close front or close central rounded vowel [~] may be transcribed as near-close near-front . Historical shifts. Historically, the Old Turkic mid vowels have raised from mid to  high, whereas the Old Turkic high vowels have become the Bashkir reduced mid series. (The same shifts have also happened in Tatar.) Grammar. A member of the Turkic language family, Bashkir is an agglutinative, SOV language. A large part of the Bashkir vocabulary has Turkic roots; and there are many loan words in Bashkir from Russian, Arabic and Persian sources.