Karachay-Balkar
Turkic language
Karachay–Balkar (къарачай-малкъар тил, qaraçay-malqar til), often referred to as the "mountaineer language" (таулу тил, tawlu til) by its speakers, is a Turkic language spoken by the Karachays and Balkars in Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia, European Russia, as well as by an immigrant population in Afyonkarahisar Province, Turkey. It is divided into two dialects: Karachay-Baksan-Chegem, which pronounces two phonemes as /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ and Malkar, which pronounces the corresponding phonemes as /ts/ and /z/. The modern Karachay–Balkar written language is based on the Karachay–Baksan–Chegem dialect. The language is closely related to Kumyk.
Phonology
Parentheses indicate allophones, brackets indicate phonemes from loanwords.
Orthography
Historically, the Arabic alphabet had been used by first writers until 1924. Handwritten manuscripts of the Balkar poet Kazim Mechiev and other examples of literature have been preserved to this day. The first printed books in Karachay–Balkar were published in the beginning of the 20th century. In 1910, the prominent educator and the father of literary Karachay-Balkar, Ismail Akbaev, based in Temir-Khan-Shura (Buynaksk), first standardized the Karachay-Balkar Arabic alphabet and published a book titled "A teaching aid for initial teaching of children to write and read". In 1915, a syndicate of teachers from the religious and secular schools of Karachay commissioned Akbaev to develop a national script.
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This entry incorporates text from “Karachay-Balkar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.