Information about the Buryat Language
Language Classification
The Buryat language is part of the Mongolian language group, which besides Buryat includes languages such as Khalkha, Kalmyk and Mogul (Montgomery 41). The Mongolian language group itself is a member of the Altaic language family, which consists of the Tungusic, Mongolian, and Turkic language groups (Montgomery 42).
Interesting Properties of the Language
Buryat is an agglutinative language, which means that a large number of suffixes can be added to nouns and verbs for grammatical purposes (Montgomery 43). Other examples of agglutinative languages include Japanese and Korean. Another interesting grammatical feature that can be found in the Buryat language is vowel harmony, which means that a given word will only have vowels produced in the front of the mouth, or only have vowels produced in the back of the mouth (Montgomery 46). However, there are also two neutral vowels that can be used with both front and back vowels (Montgomery 46). An example of a word in Buryat that follows this rule is altargana, as it contains all front vowels. Buryat also uses vowel length to distinguish words, which means that words can be completely identical except for vowel length and have very different meanings (Montgomery 47). For example, the word khaana with a long vowel means ‘where’, and the word khana with a short vowel means ‘wall’ (Montgomery 47). Finally, in Buryat the verb is always at the end of the sentence, which means that the language is a bit strict when it comes to word order (Alena interview).
Writing System
A writing system for Buryat first appeared in the 1600s and was based on the classical vertical Mongolian script where words are written in columns from top to bottom that are then read from left to right (“Buriats” 200).
In 1931, the Latin alphabet replaced the traditional Mongolian script; however, by 1937 the Latin script was itself replaced by a Cyrillic alphabet (Poppe 2).
Below, the evolution of the writing system can be seen through the changing front page of the Buriaad Ynen newspaper.
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Dialects
Buryat has many different dialects with some being more mutually intelligible than others (Montgomery 51). Unfortunately, there seems to be no agreement on how to categorize all of the dialects (Montgomery 51); however, scholar Nicholas Poppe has suggested that there are 10 main dialects (1). The standard dialect that is used for literary purposes is known as the Khori dialect, and it is spoken on the eastern side of Lake Baikal (Montogomery 51).
Interesting Facts About the Language
Like other languages, the Buryat language has a decent number of loanwords in it (Montgomery 48). Languages that have contributed to the Buryat lexicon include Russian, Siberian Turkic languages (such as Tofalar), Tungusic languages (such as Evenki), Tibetan, and Chinese (Montgomery 48-51).Statistics - Buryat Population and Language Use
According to the 2010 Всероссийская перепись населения (census), there are 461,389 Buryats living in the Russian Federation. A total of 218,557 people speak Buryat in the country. 5,581 speakers of Buryat are Russian, 206,430 are Buryat, and the rest belong to different ethnic groups.There are 77,667 Buryats in the Irkutsk Oblast’. In the Oblast’ a total of 23,746 people speak Buryat. Of the Buryat speakers, 22,292 are ethnically Buryat, 882 are Russian, and the rest belong to different ethnic groups.
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