Khakas is a Turkic language spoken by the Khakas people, who mainly live in the southwestern Siberian Khakas Republic, or Khakassia, in Russia. The Khakas number 73,000, of whom 42,000 speak the Khakas language, most of whom are bilingual in Russian. Traditionally, the Khakas language is divided into several closely related dialects, which take their names from the different tribes:,, Koybal, Beltir, and Kyzyl. In fact, these names represent former administrative units rather than tribal or linguistic groups. The people speaking all these dialects simply referred to themselves as Tadar.
History and documentation
The people who speak the Fuyu Kyrgyz language originated in the Yenisei region of Siberia but were relocated into the Dzungar Khanate by the Dzungars, and then the Qing moved them from Dzungaria to northeastern China in 1761, and the name may be due to the survival of a common tribal name. The Yenisei Kirghiz were made to pay tribute in a treaty concluded between the Dzungars and Russians in 1635. Sibe Bannermen were stationed in Dzungaria while Northeastern China was where some of the remaining Öelet Oirats were deported to. The Nonni basin was where Oirat Öelet deportees were settled. The Yenisei Kirghiz were deported along with the Öelet. Chinese and Oirat replaced Oirat and Kirghiz during Manchukuo as the dual languages of the Nonni-based Yenisei Kirghiz. The present-day Kyrgyz people originally lived in the same area that the speakers of Fuyu Kyrgyz at first dwelled within modern-day Russia. These Kyrgyz were known as the Yenisei Kyrgyz. It is now spoken in northeastern China'sHeilongjiang province, in and around Fuyu County, Qiqihar by a small number of passive speakers who are classified as Kyrgyz nationality. The first major recordings of the Khakas language originate from the middle of the 19th century. The Finnish linguist Matthias Castrén, who travelled through northern and Central Asia between 1845–1849, wrote a treatise on the Koybal dialect, and recorded an epic. Wilhelm Radloff traveled the southern Siberian region extensively between 1859 and 1870. The result of his research was, among others, published in his four-volume dictionary, and in his ten-volume series of Turkic texts. The second volume contains his Khakas materials, which were provided with a German translation. The ninth volume, provided with a Russian translation, was prepared by Radloff's student Katanov, who was a Sagay himself, and contains further Khakas materials. The Khakas literary language, which was developed only after the Russian Revolution of 1917, is based on the central dialects Sagay and Kacha; the Beltir dialect has largely been assimilated by Sagay, and the Koybal dialect by Kacha. In 1924, a Cyrillic alphabet was devised, which was replaced by a Latin alphabet in 1929, and by a new Cyrillic alphabet in 1939. In 2012, an Enduring Voices expedition documented the Xyzyl language from the Republic of Khakassia. Officially considered a dialect of Khakas, its speakers regard Xyzyl as a separate language of its own.
