Native to Russia Ethnicity Dolgans ISO 639-3 dlg | Region Krasnoyarsk Krai Native speakers 1,100 (2010 census) | |
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Language family Turkic
Common Turkic
Siberian Turkic
Northern
Dolgan | ||
The Dolgan language is a Turkic language with around 1,000 speakers, spoken in the Taymyr Peninsula in Russia. Its speakers are known as the Dolgans.
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Classification
Dolgan is a member of the Northern Turkic family of languages, within which its closest relative is Sakha (Yakut). Like Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish, Dolgan has vowel harmony, is agglutinative, and has no grammatical gender. Word order is usually subject–object–verb.
History
The Dolgan language started out having a Latin alphabet in the early 20th century. Over time, the Cyrillic alphabet was used instead since it is one that is the same alphabet used by the related language, Yakut. Evenki's influence on Dolgan can explain, in part, why it is considered a separate language from Yakut. Dolgan has made appearances in newspapers as well as schools starting around the time of the 60s. However, now there are only around 1,050 speakers of the language.