Kumyk

the language of the Kumyks, who live mainly in the Dagestan ASSR and also in the Chechen-Ingush and Severnaia Osetiia ASSR’s. There are about 185,900 speakers of Kumyk (1970 census).

Kumyk is related to the Kipchak group of Turkic languages. Some features of Kumyk are the presence of initial g instead of k (gishi instead of kishi, “person”), long consonants, the participial form -agan/-egen, and the genitive affix -nï/ni without a final consonant (it coincides with the accusative form). Kumyk has three dialects: Kaitak, Buinak, and Khasav”iurt (the literary language is based on the last two dialects). The Kaitak dialect is characterized by a number of sharp differences from the other dialects and the literary language—for example, dissimilation of vowels and the presence of the glottalized consonants ts’, k’, t’, and ch ’ (an influence of the Caucasian languages). The Kumyk literary language was created during the Soviet period and is one of the literary languages of the Dagestan ASSR. The Kumyk writing system was based on Arabic script until 1929 and on Latin script until 1938; it has been based on Russian script since 1938.