Chulym Turkic

I. Sociolinguistic data

1. Existing alternative names

The Chulym Turkic language (also “Chulym”) used to be called the Yasak/Isak/Isashny non-Slavic language, the language of the Tomsk Karagas, the language of the Chulym Khakass, the language of the Chulym Tatars. The modern name comes from the river Chulym, the basin of which is home to this Western Siberian ethnic language. In foreign literature, the term ӧs til(i) ‘Chulym language’ (literally ‘our own language’) is sometimes used, for example by David Harrison, Gregory Anderson (“ Ös tili (Middle and Upper Chulym dialects): towards a comprehensive documentation ”. Turkic Languages, 2006. 10(1). P. 47–71).

2. General characteristics

2.1. Number of native speakers and the corresponding ethnic group

In the census of 2010, 355 people were counted as the Chulym, of which 44 identified Chulym as their native language. In the census of 2010, there was also a question about native language proficiency and only 7 people identified themselves as proficient. This generally corresponds to the assessment of linguists and experts in Chulym Turkic. About thirty more people in 2013 were passive speakers: they could understand the language, but did not speak it. Currently, according to Valeria Lemskaya, the number of native speakers has decreased to approximately 30 people.

2.2. Age of speakers

Several elderly people speak the language fluently; young people and children do not speak it at all; passive speakers are primarily the people of the middle generation. Nowadays, the use of the language is preserved primarily in artificial situations: communication with scholars and at folk festivals.

2.3. Sociolinguistic characteristics

2.3.1. Level of the threat of extinction

Chulym is close to extinction. The transmission of the language from the older to the younger generations has stopped. All the speakers of Chulym Turkic are bilingual, that is, they speak Chulym Turkic and Russian. But with Russian being a socially more prestigious language, speakers of Chulym Turkic always use Russian in situations of natural communication.

2.3.2. Use in various fields

The table indicates several areas in which the Chulym Turkic language is still used, albeit rarely; in everyday communication it is preserved only in the village of Pasechnoye.  Performers at folk festivals sing either pop songs translated from Russian or the ditties composed by native speakers. Since 2017, some Gospel texts have been translated into Chulym Turkic, but they are not used in liturgical service. The data on language use in various fields are taken from the Chulym Turkic section of the project “Minority languages of Russia” of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  The section was compiled by Valeria Lemskaya, and it also contains information on the Gospel translations: https://minlang. iling-ran.ru/lang/chulymsko-tyurkskiy ).

2.4. Information about a writing system (if applicable)

Until recently, the language was unwritten; neither children nor adults ever learned to write and read in their native tongue. Eradication of illiteracy in the 21st century took place only as the following initiative: for three years, in the school in the village of Pasechnoye the late Alexander Kondiyakov, Chairman of the Chulym tribal community of small-numbered minorities, headed the Chulym Turkic language club. He, together with Valeria Lemskaya, developed the alphabet for the Meletsky sub-dialect of the Middle Chulym dialect of Chulym Turkic. This alphabet is used primarily in academic publications.

Figure 1. Alphabet of the Meletsky sub-dialect of the Middle Chulym dialect of Chulym Turkic

The alphabet for the Tutal sub-dialect of the Middle Chulym dialect was developed by Vasily Gabov, and it was this alphabet that was used in the translation of the Gospel of Mark. ( http://teguldet.lib.tomsk.ru/files2/1206_Biblija_CHulym+.pdf ) Valeria Lemskaya used this alphabet when compiling lessons of the Chulym language, published on the website of Teguldet Library ( https://teguldet.lib.tomsk.ru/page/1157/ ). This version of the alphabet is used both in teaching aids and in the books in the Chulym language

Figure 2. Alphabet of the Tutal sub-dialect of the Middle Chulym dialect of Chulym Turkic

3. Geographical characteristics:

3.1. Constituent entities of the Russian Federation with ethnic communities

Speakers of Chulym Turkic live in the Tomsk region and in the south of the Krasnoyarsk Territory. The sub-dialects are divided by the administrative border between these two entities: the speakers of the Tutal sub-dialect reside in the Tomsk region, and the speakers of the Meletsky sub-dialect live in the south of the Krasnoyarsk Territory (Dolgan-Nenets Autonomous Area, existed until 2007). The now extinct Lower Chulym dialect was spoken in the Tomsk region.

3.2. Total number of native settlements

 Speakers of Chulym Turkic live in four native villages in the Tomsk region and in two villages in the south of the Krasnoyarsk Territory.

3.3. List of main native settlements

Teguldetsky district of the Tomsk region: Teguldet, Bely Yar, Kuyanovskaya Gar, Novoshumilovo.  

Tyukhtetsky district of the Krasnoyarsk Territory: Pasechnoye, Chindat.

4. Historical dynamics

The number of speakers of Chulym Turkic is difficult to determine from the census data: the Chulym Turki were recognized as a separate ethnic group only at the beginning of the 21st century. Before that they had been counted as Tatars, Karagas, and later the Khakass. They first appeared only in the census of 2002 when 656 people were registered as Chulyms, of which 270 people named Chulym as their native language (the census did not include the native language proficiency question, so those who understood the expression “native language” as “the traditional language of your nationality” could have marked it as native, even though they didn’t speak the language themselves). In the census of 2010, 355 people identified themselves as Chulyms, of which 44 people named Chulym as their native language, with only 7 indicating language proficiency. As mentioned above, the number of speakers identified in the census of 2010 generally corresponds to the estimates given by experts in the Chulym Turkic language. Valeria Lemskaya, in the article “Chulym Turki: population decline from a transformation of ethno-linguistic self-awareness” (Tomsk Journal of Linguistic and Anthropological Research. 2013. No. 2 (2). P. 50-55), analyzes the following phenomenon: according to the census of 2010, there were almost half as many Chulyms as in the census of 2002. The difference in numbers can be explained not by the natural population decline, but by how the self-identification of children from mixed Chulym-Slavic marriages changed over time. The change in self-identification, according to the researcher, is influenced by various factors: a greater prestige of the titular nation, reduction of benefits for the indigenous population, etc. It can also be assumed that in 2002 there was a surge of national self-awareness because the Chulyms had only been officially recognized as a people just 2 years earlier (Decree No. 255 of March 24, 2000).

To complete the picture, we can also quote the data from two regional censuses provided by Valeria Lemskaya in her article “Verbal systems of the Chulym Turkic dialects: verb tense forms” (Ural-Altai Studies. 2010. No. 2 (3). pp. 19-35): “According to the census of 1996, conducted on the initiative of the Chulymets association, 742 Chulym Turki (Chulyms) lived in the Tomsk region; in the Krasnoyarsk Territory in 2006, there were 157 (self-identified) Chulyms”.

In general, the common tendency for all the languages of the small-numbered peoples can be extrapolated to Chulym: the number of speakers steadily declined in the 20 ^th century; in fact, at the beginning of the 21st century, Chulym Turkic was spoken only by a handful of people whose age approached or exceeded 70. One can also consider the data on the Lower Chulym dialect: at the time of Andrei Dulzon’s research in the 1950s, there were about 250 speakers of Lower Chulym, and the last speaker of this dialect died in 2011.

II. Linguistic data

II.1. Position in the genealogy of world languages

The Chulym language belongs to the Turkic language group. There is no agreement among scholars as to the internal classification of the languages of the Turkic family, and to which subgroup thereof Chulym Turkic belongs. In the areal-based classifications, Chulym belongs to Siberian Turkic languages. At the same time, the dialects of Chulym Turkic are similar to other Turkic languages in a number of features: Andrei Dulzon noted that some of them make Lower Chulym similar to the language of the Baraba Tatars, and Middle Chulym – to the Kyzyl dialect of the Khakass language.

II.2. Dialectal situation

Chulym Turkic is divided into two dialects: Middle Chulym and Lower Chulym, the dialects having been named after the middle and lower reaches of the Chulym, respectively). Currently, the Lower Chulym dialect is considered extinct (the last speaker, according to Valeria Lemskaya, died in 2011). Each dialect consisted of several sub-dialects (Andrei Dulzon, “Dialects and sub-dialects of the Turki of Chulym.” Soviet Turkology. 1973. No. 2. Pp. 16 – 29), the distribution of which coincided with the borders of the so-called non-Slavic volosts. Figure 3 shows a fragment of a map compiled by Boris Dolgikh. This map is a reconstruction of the settlements of the peoples of Siberia in the 17th century according to the yasak (tax) documents of the Russian administration of Western Siberia. On this map you can see the boundaries of the volosts, each corresponding to a specific sub-dialect of the Middle Chulym or Lower Chulym dialect. The Lower Chulym dialect was divided into the following sub-dialects:

1) Kueriksky sub-dialect: Koryukovskaya volost;

2) Ketsiksky: Kurchikova (or Kiyskaya) volost;

3) Ezhinsky: Baigul volost (it was this dialect that survived longer than the other Lower Chulym sub-dialects);

4) Yachinsky: Yachinskaya volost;

5) Chibinsky: Kyzyldeeva volost.

The Middle Chulym dialect is divided into two sub-dialects:

1) Tutal: Tutalova volost;

2) Meletsky: a volost with the center in the Meletsky fort. 

Figure 3. Non-Slavic volosts along the Chulym River (Map of the distribution of ethnic groups, settlements of tribes and clans of the peoples of Siberia in the 17th century, compiled by Boris Dolgikh in “History of Siberia from ancient times to the present in five volumes”. Vol. 2. Leningrad: Nauka, 1968).

On this map, the territories of the settlement of the Turkic-speaking peoples are marked in yellow, and those of the Samoyed in blue {https://bigenc.ru/linguistics/text/3530757} (the fragment includes only speakers of Southern Selkup) { ссылка на статью Атласа }. They are the only Samoyeds who were direct neighbors of the Chulym Turki). The settlement of the people who spoke the Yenisei languages is marked in pink{ссылка} (here the neighbors of the Chulym Turks used to be speakers of two extinct languages, Arin and Pumpokol). The map also shows that in the 17th century the speakers of the Chulym Turkic language did not yet live in the Baigul volost, located at the confluence of the Chulym and the Ob: at that time this volost was still Selkup; later the southern Selkups living here were partially pushed aside and partially assimilated by the speakers of Chulym Turkic.

II.3. Brief history of academic research of the language

The first samples of the Chulym Turkic speech were collected in the middle of the 19th century by the outstanding Turkic scholar Vasily Radlov and published in his book “Samples of folk literature of the Turkic tribes living in Southern Siberia and the Dzungarian steppe. Part II: Subdialects of Abakan (Sagai, Koibal, Kachin), Kyzyl and Chulym (Kuerik)” (St. Petersburg, 1868). A deep and systematic study of the Chulym Turkic language was carried out by Andrei Dulzon, who organized the study of the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Tomsk region at the Tomsk State Pedagogical Institute. In 1946-1951, Professor Dulzon repeatedly went on expeditions to the Chulym (both as an archaeologist and as a linguist). In 1952, his description of the Chulym Turkic language was published: “Chulym Tatars and their language. Academic notes of the Tomsk State Pedagogical Institute” (V. IX. Tomsk, 1952. Pp. 76 – 211). The archives of the Department of Languages of the Peoples of Siberia at the Tomsk State Pedagogical University contain a dictionary card index started by Andrei Dulzon on the two dialects of the Chulym Turkic language. The study of the Chulym language was continued in Tomsk in the 1970s by Biryukovich and Boni, and their field notes are also kept in the archives of the Department. Professor Biryukovich published a number of works on the Chulym Turkic language, including monographs on its phonetics, morphology and vocabulary. In the 21st century, the research of the Chulym Turkic language and its documentation have been actively carried out by Valeria Lemskaya, Denis Tokmashev, Gregory Anderson and David Harrison.

II.4. Basic linguistic information (phonetics, grammar, vocabulary)

Phonetics

The Middle Chulym and Lower Chulym dialects demonstrate significant differences in the field of phonetics, primarily in vocalism.

Vocalism

The vocalic system of both dialects contains short and long vowels. In Lower Chulym this contrast affects all eight vowels; in the Middle Chulym dialect there is one less long phoneme: the vowel i̮ (ы) can only be short. In the orthography of the Tutal dialect, the length-shortness opposition is not present; in the orthography for the Meletsky dialect it is indicated by a double vowel (for example, the word 'fish' with a long [ā] is written in the Meletsky orthography as paalyk , but in Tutal as palyg ). However, in orthography it is always possible to distinguish between the two phonemes, since these sounds have additional pronunciation differences: the short vowel in is pronounced [æ] (as in man ), represented in Meletsky orthography as ä , in Tutal as я .  The long vowel is pronounced as [ē], written as e , э .

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of the Chulym Turkic language reflects the contacts of the Chulyms with speakers of other languages: Valentin Rassadin identified some Mongolian words in Chulym Turkic, yet the main and increasingly prevalent source of borrowings since the 19th century has been Russian: functional words (conjunctions а , и , что , пока , то ли - то ли//and, what/that, while, either-or , indicator бы (would) of the subjunctive mood) and content words, mainly nouns (for example, чай , хозяин , магазин, сват, шелк//tea, owner, shop, co-father-in-law, silk ), but also verbs (for example, to walk ).

Morphology.  General characteristics

The Chulym Turkic language, like the other Turkic languages, has a rich morphology. All meanings, both inflectional and word-forming, are expressed by suffixes (there are no prefixes in Chulym Turkic, nor are there any in the other Turkic languages).

As regards the grammar, Chulym Turkic belongs to the agglutinative type. It means that:

• a large number of grammatical meanings are expressed within the word (some scholars identify over twenty verbal forms expressing aspect, tense or mood).
• grammatical indicators are completely regular. In agglutinative languages, there are no different indicators with the same meaning, unlike in Russian, where, depending on the type of declension, the same case can have different indicators. For example, in Russian there are three indicators of the dative case in the singular: отц- у , матер- и , женщин- е , and one more in the plural: отц- ам . In Chulym Turkic, the choice of indicator depends only on the harmony of the vowels, and sometimes also on the preceding consonant: kizhi 'person, nominative'; kizhi-ge , ‘person, dative’; kizhi-lӓr 'people, nominative', kizhi-lӓr-ge 'people, dative'; ӄys 'girl, nominative '; ӄys-a 'girl, dative'; ӄys-tar 'girls, nominative'; ӄys-tar-ga 'girls, dative'.
• there is a tendency to express each grammatical meaning by a separate indicator (cf. Chulym Turkic kys-tar-ga 'girls, dative', where the word has separate indicators for plurality and case, whereas in the Russian devochk- am (‘girls’, dative), the ending expresses both the plurality and the case).

Morphology of noun

Noun in Chulym Turkic has the following categories: number (singular and plural), case (seven cases) and possessiveness (suffixes, indicating who the object belongs to, with the meaning 'mine', 'yours', 'his' , hers', 'ours', etc.: six in total). If a noun has all three of these categories, the order of indicators is as follows: noun stem + number + possessiveness+case: kӓmӓler-in-dӓ ‘in your boats’.

Possessive forms, in addition to indicating ownership, perform two more important functions. Firstly, they form a so-called izafet (ezafe) construction: they formalize the connection between two nouns. This construction has the form Noun1 + Noun2 with a possessive indicator, for example, agamnyn at-y ‘my father’s horse’ (literally ‘of my father horse-his’). This construction can have a variety of meanings. It can indicate ownership, as in the above-mentioned example. But quite often its meaning goes beyond belonging in the narrow sense, cf. expressions such as inӓk sӱd-ӱ ‘cow’s milk’ (literally ‘cow milk-hers’) or Us kizi-si ‘Chulym person’ (literally ‘Chulym man-his’).

Vocabulary

The vocabulary of Chulym Turkic reflects the contacts of the Chulym people with speakers of other languages: Valentin Rassadin identified some Mongol words in Chulym, yet the main and increasingly powerful source of borrowings since the 19th century to the present has been Russian: some functional words have been borrowed (conjunctions а , и , что , пока , то ли — то ли // and, that/what, while, either - or , etc., the particle бы of the subjunctive mood corresponding to the English would ), as well as content words, mainly nouns (for example, чай , хозяин , магазин, сват, шелк//tea, owner, shop, co-father-in-law, silk ), and also verbs (for example, гулять // to walk ).