Yakut

Where it’s spoken

Yakut (also called Sakha; Yakut: Саха тыла, Saxa tıla) is the official language of the Sakha Republic in eastern Siberia, alongside Russian. About 450,000 people speak it. Sakha covers an area larger than India but has fewer than 1 million inhabitants. The language has held up against Russification better than many other Siberian languages, partly due to geographic isolation.

What it sounds like

Yakut has vowel harmony and eight vowels with phonemic length and diphthongs. Its consonant system includes the uvular q. The language is heavy with archaic Turkic features but also shows substantial Mongolic and Tungusic substrate and contact influence. Stress falls on the final syllable.

How it’s written

Yakut has used a modified Cyrillic alphabet since 1939, with 40 letters that include four additional characters (Ҕ, Ҥ, Ө, Һ) and one for the long vowel. Earlier brief uses of Latin (1929–1939) and a Russian-style Cyrillic with diacritics (Novgorodov alphabet, 1917–1929) preceded the current system.

History

Sakha oral tradition includes the olonkho epic genre, recognized by UNESCO as a masterpiece of intangible cultural heritage. The Yakut people maintain strong cultural and linguistic identity in the harsh Siberian climate, with the language receiving institutional support since the 1992 republic constitution.