Khakas Dialects, Late 19th and Early 21st Centuries

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to demonstrate some new results obtained when working on the Dialectological Atlas of the Turkic languages of Russia and the Electronic Corpus of Khakas. Material and methods. While preparing the Atlas, in addition to the already available published and archival sources, the team of authors is collecting field material using specially compiled questionnaires focused on some facts from the history of the Turkic languages. . Results and conclusions. The study shows that the collection of materials based on historically oriented dialectological questionnaires helps obtain data that sheds additional light on the genealogical classification of the dialects, the ways in which they diverge and converge, as well as on archaic and innovative phenomena in the areas under study. Also, considering of all materials, both field and archival, allows conducting micro diachronic studies on the spread of linguistic phenomena in the dialects at different periods of time and building well-founded hypotheses on the causes of changes. In the current paper one phonetic and one mophological feature of the Khakas dialects are compared, being described in the end of the XIX century (based on the archival data) and nowadays (according to our field recordings). We show the shift of their isoglosses and discuss why the language has changed.

Keywords

• turkic languages
• dialectology
• the khakass language
• areal linguistics
• dialectal continuum
• historical phonetics and morphology