Yakut language - Definition and Overview

Yakut language or Sakha is a Turkic language with about 363,000 speakers in the Russian Federation, mainly in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) and also in the Amur, Magadan, Sakhalin regions and the Taimyr and Evenki autonomous districts.

Yakut first appeared in writing in 1692 as part of a book by the traveller N. Witsen and published in Amsterdam. The first literary work in Yakut Reminiscences by A. Y. Uvarovsky and its German translation was published in 1851 as a part of Otto N. Böhtlingk's work About the Yakut language. Böhtlingk used an alphabet based on Cyrillic with some special characters.

Between 1922-1939 a version of the Latin alphabet devised by S.A. Novgorodov was used to write Yakut, and since 1939 the Cyrillic alphabet has been used.

Source: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/yakut.htm

Yakut is written using the Cyrillic script: the Yakut alphabet consists of the Russian one plus 5 additional letters: Ҕҕ, Ҥҥ, Өө, Һһ, Үү.

External links

• Sakha Open World (a platform to promote the Yakut Language on the web; News, Translator, Music, Fonts, Forum; in Yakut, Unicode): http://doydu.sakhaopenworld.org/

• Russian translations of Yakut texts (heroic poetry, fairy tales, legends, proverbs, etc): http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzsylm/sakha/bib/

• Polyglot Dictionary: Yakut - Mongolian - Russian - German - English: http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzsylm/mongol/mongol_sakha.html

• Baayaga village website - news and stories about and by the people of Baayaga (in Yakut): http://www.baayaga.narod.ru