Sakha and Dolgan, the North Siberian Turkic languages

• Main Authors: Pakendorf, Brigitte, Stapert, Eugénie
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 2020
• Subjects: Sakha; Taimyr; Yakutia
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198804628.003.0027

This chapter provides a brief structural overview of the North Siberian Turkic languages Sakha (also known as Yakut) and Dolgan. Both languages are spoken in the northeast of the Russian Federation: Sakha in the Republic Sakha (Yakutia) and Dolgan on the Taimyr Peninsula. These languages clearly fit the Turkic linguistic profile with vowel harmony, agglutinative morphology, SOV word order, and preposed relative clauses, but owing to contact-induced changes there are considerable differences from other Turkic languages as well. Notable differences are the loss of the Turkic genitive and locative cases and the development of a partitive and a comparative case, as well as a distinction between an immediate and a remote imperative. Like other so-called Altaic languages, Sakha and Dolgan make widespread use of nonfinite verb forms in subordination.