Southern Altai Language

The language has some mutual intelligibility with the Northern Altai language, leading to the two being traditionally considered as a single language. According to modern classifications—at least since the middle of the 20th century—they are considered to be two separate languages.

Southern Altai
Oirot, Oyrot (before 1948)
тÿштÿк алтай тил, tüştük altay til
Southern Altai written in Cyrillic and Latin scripts
Native to	Russia
Region	Altai Republic
Native speakers	68,700 (2020)
Language family	Turkic Common Turkic Kipchak Kyrgyz–Kipchak Southern Altai
Writing system	Cyrillic
Language codes
ISO 639-2	alt
ISO 639-3	alt
Glottolog	sout2694
ELP	Southern Altai

Written Altai is based on Southern Altai. According to some reports, however, it is rejected by Northern Altai children. Dialects include Altai Proper and Talangit.

Southern Altai is a member of the Turkic language family. Within this family, there have been various attempts to classify Altai, and not all of them agree as to its position as it has a number of ambiguous characteristics. Due to certain similarities with Kyrgyz, some scholars group Altai with the Kyrgyz–Kipchak subgroup of the Kypchak languages.

Southern Altai is primarily spoken in the Altai Republic, where it has official status alongside Russian.

Dialects

Baskakov identifies three dialects of Southern Altai, some of which have distinctive sub-varieties:

• Altai
  • Maima (sub-variety)
• Telengit
  • Telengit-Teles
  • Chui
• Teleut

Some sources consider Telengit and Teleut to be distinct languages.

Southern Altai has 8 vowels, which may be long or short, and 20 consonants, plus marginal consonants that occur only in loan words.

Vowels

Consonants

Phonemes in parentheses occur only in Russian loanwords.

Southern Altai employs a version of the Cyrillic alphabet with additional characters to represent sounds not found in Russian.