LWM 251: Xakas

Xakas

Gregory David Anderson
University of Manchester

Xakas is a Turkic language spoken by 70,000 people in south central Siberia.

Xakas is a cover term created in the early 20th century to cover the related dialect clusters of the region; the terms positively viewed by some members of the ethnolinguistic group and negatively by others. Xakas is one of the only Turkic languages to preserve nine short vowels. Morphologically, Xakas shows an unusually high number of affixally realized verbal categories, as well as a complicated AUX verb system. In the imperative Xakas has preserved a dual inclusive. Xakas has a very high number of cases for a Turkic language (9), a number more typical of central and eastern Siberian languages. Due to the centuries-long contact with speakers of Russian, Xakas not only has a large number of Russian loans but it also shows a great-degree of contact-induced restructuring, some examples of which have even found their way into the standardized literary language. The present study is an analysis of the standardized register of Xakas, and constitutes the first description of Xakas in English.

ISBN 9783895865114. Languages of the World/ Materials 251. 100 pp. 1998.