Язык и культура современных бурят

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, 2005). The Mongolian language group itself is a member of the Altaic language family, which consists of the Tungusic, Mongolian, and Turkic language groups (Montgomery, 2005).

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, 2005). 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, 2005). However, there are also two neutral vowels that can be used with both front and back vowels (Montgomery, 2005). 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, 2005). For example, the word khaana with a long vowel means ‘where’, and the word khana with a short vowel means ‘wall’ (Montgomery, 2005). 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 (Pikhunova, 2018).

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”, 2017).

In 1931, the Latin alphabet replaced the traditional Mongolian script; however, by 1937 the Latin script was itself replaced by a Cyrillic alphabet (Poppe, 1960).

Below, the evolution of the writing system can be seen through the changing front page of the Buriaad Ynen newspaper.

Dialects

Buryat has many different dialects with some being more mutually intelligible than others (Montgomery, 2005). Unfortunately, there seems to be no agreement on how to categorize all of the dialects (Montgomery, 2005); however, scholar Nicholas Poppe has suggested that there are 10 main dialects (Poppe, 1960). 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 (Montgomery, 2005).

Interesting Facts About the Language

Like other languages, the Buryat language has a decent number of loanwords in it (Montgomery, 2005). 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, 2005).

Statistics - Buryat Population and Language Use

According to the 2010 Всероссийская перепись населения (All-Russia census), there are 461,389 Buryats living in the Russian Federation (Vserossiskaya perepis naseleniya, 2010, V4, #3). A total of 218,557 people speak Buryat in the country (Vserossiskaya perepis naseleniya, 2010, V4, #6). 5,581 speakers of Buryat are Russian, 206,430 are Buryat, and the rest belong to different ethnic groups (Vserossiskaya perepis naseleniya, 2010, V4, #6). 

There are 77,667 Buryats in the Irkutsk Oblast’ (Vserossiskaya perepis naseleniya, 2010, V4, #7). In the Oblast’ a total of 23,746 people speak Buryat (Vserossiskaya perepis naseleniya, 2010, V4, #7). Of the Buryat speakers, 22,292 are ethnically Buryat, 882 are Russian, and the rest belong to different ethnic groups (Vserossiskaya perepis naseleniya, 2010, V4, #7).

Audio Sample of the Buryat Language        

This is an audio recording of Elena Konstantinova, who is the leader of the Buryat Philology Department at Irkutsk State University. In it she speaks Buryat and then explains what she said in Russian. English subtitles were added to the Russian portion to enable English speakers to understand what was said in Buryat. (Make sure to turn on the subtitles by clicking on the settings button in the bottom right corner, and then selecting the appropriate language for them to be displayed in.)
This audio clip comes from an interview with two professors in the Buryat Philology Department (Sharakshinova & Tagarova, 2018).





 

 

 

 






 

 

 

 

 

 

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