User:Abush1/Language selection

Introduction

I'm really interested in working on languages in the Turkic family, and I'm planning on working with William and Visnuk. My preference for which language is:

1. Uyghur
2. Shor
3. Dolgan

Uyghur

• Uyghur is a language spoken by the Uyghur minority group in the Xinjiang autonomous region of China
• Uyghur has around 8-12 million speakers
• It is an agglutinative language with no grammatical gender or definiteness, as well as features such as elision and vowel harmony
• It uses a modified Arabic alphabet, which is unique among Turkic languages
• Many Uyghur speakers also speak Chinese, or another minority language from the region such as Uzbek or Kazakh
• Uyghur has many loan words from Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Chagatai, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Russian
• Its ISO code is uig
• Uyghur has 3 main dialects, based on geographical region
• It belongs to the Karluk branch of the Turkic language family, along with Uzbek, which is nearly mutually intelligible
• Some sources include [1] [2] [3]

Shor

• Shor is a critically endangered Turkic language spoken by around 2800 people in the Mountain Shoriya region of Southwestern Siberia
• Not all ethnic Shors speak the language, partially due to the lack of writing and language education in schools
• The two dialects, Mrassu and Kondoma, are very different and actually belong to different branches of the Turkic language family
• The modern Shor alphabet uses a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet
• Shor has many borrowed words from Mongolian and Russian
• Its ISO code is cjs
• The Kemerovo State University now teaches a Shor language class
• Some sources include [4] [5]

Dolgan

• Dolgan is a severely endangered Turkic language spoken in the Taymyr peninsula in Russia
• It uses the Cyrillic alphabet
• Dolgan has around 930 speakers
• Its ISO code is dlg
• One of the reasons why the number of speakers is decreasing is because of the poor linguistic integration among families with mixed marriages
• The language has 3 main dialects, and is also similar enough to Yakut to be mutually intelligible
• Noun categories are determined by number, possession, and case
• It has eight grammatical cases
• Many loan words come from Russian vocabulary
• Some sources include [6] [7],,