The Bashkir Language

The Bashkir language is one of the official languages of Bashkortostan. It belongs to the Altaic language family of Kipchak branch of the Turkic group of languages. The greatest relationship of the Bashkir language is with Tatar, Kazakh, Nogai languages, it also has a lot of common features with the Eastern Turkic languages (, Altai, Khakas, etc.). In addition, in the Bashkir language we can find traces of interactions with the Mongolian, Tungus-Manchurian, Finno-Ugric and Iranian languages. It has borrowed from Arabic borrowing and over the last century it has been deeply affected by Russian. The total number of speakers of the Bashkir language, according to the census in 2002, is 1 057 000 people. The language is spoken (taking into account the population density) in the Republic of Bashkortostan, in some areas in the Perm, Chelyabinsk, Orenburg, Sverdlovsk, Kurgan, Samara, Saratov, Tyumen Oblast and the Republic of Tatarstan, Udmurtia, as well as in places of geographical dispersion of the Bashkirs in Russia, and in far and near east countries. On February 5, 1999 the National Assembly of the Republic of Bashkortostan, Qurultay adopted the Law “On languages of the Republic of Bashkortostan.” The law recognized the official status of the Bashkir language, along with Russian. Of course, the adoption of a specific law of language, the development of state programs for the preservation, research and development of the languages of the peoples of the Republic of Bashkortostan between 2000-2005 and 2006-2010, amendments to the Constitution of the Republic of Bashkortostan, the law “On education”, more than 30 regulations on language policies have altogether created favorable conditions for the development of the Bashkir language, the expansion of its social functions and prestige. The modern alphabet of the Bashkir language, based on the Cyrillic alphabet, consists of 42 letters. In addition to 33 letters common with Russian language, 9 more letters were adopted to denote the specific sounds of the Bashkir language.