The Karakalpak Language
The Karakalpak language includes additional letters compared to Russian.
The thirty or more different Turkic languages can be classified into four main geographical groups: south western or Oguz, north western or
Qipchaq, south eastern or Uighur-Chagatai, and north eastern or Siberian. The Chuvash language of the Volga is classified in its own separate
group. The Karakalpak language belongs to the north western group, the Qipchaq family of languages. It sits alongside Nogay, Kazakh, Kalmyk,
Tatar, Bashkir, Kyrgyz, and Altai. The Uzbek language belongs to the separate south eastern or Uighur-Chagatai group.
The Qipchaq languages can be divided in turn into three geographical sub-groups: Ponto-Caspian, Uralian and Aralo-Caspian. The latter includes
Karakalpak, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Nogay.
The Karakalpak language is closest to Kazakh. There is of course a close historical relationship between the Karakalpaks and the Kazakhs of the
Lesser Horde. In the early 18th century, the Lower Karakalpaks were actually ruled by a Kazakh Khan.
As with the other Islamic Turkic peoples, the Karakalpaks traditionally used Arabic script as a writing system and continued with this up until
about 1928. In 1925 the Russians introduced a Latin alphabet, based on the standard Latin alphabet plus a few extra letters and diacritics. This
was used up until 1940, after which there was a rapid shift to Cyrillic script. As no unified Cyrillic alphabet existed for all of the Russian
Central Asian States, each national language made its own adaptations. The Karakalpak alphabet had several additional letters to the normal Cyrillic
alphabet. The letters ә, ң, ө, ў and ү were introduced in 1945. A new Karakalpak Latin alphabet was introduced
in February 1994 and a major revision of it took place in 1995 bringing it closer to the new Uzbek Latin alphabet. To overcome problems in
typography the Karakalpaks dealt with certain letters by creating shortcuts to them - inserting an apostrophe after certain normal vowels or
consonants and thus avoiding the use of diacritics. For example the vowel ө, which sounds like the German ö became o'.
The word order is generally subject - object - verb. Karakalpak is agglutinative, with grammatical functions indicated by adding various suffixes
to a fixed stem.
Like all Turkic languages, Karakalpak has two classes of vowels: the front vowels, pronounced at the front of the mouth such as e, i, o' and u',
and the back vowels, pronounced at the back of the mouth such as a, ı, o, u. Traditional Turkic words must obey the rule of vowel harmony,
the vowels of the suffixes harmonising with the vowels of the noun or verb stem. Words are normally stressed on the final syllable.
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See Glossary for a list of Karakalpak words.
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