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The forebears of the Yakut people migrated from areas further south, around Lake Baikal, to their present homelands, along the banks of the Lena river. Of all the Turkic speaking populations they are now situated the furthest north and are the most geographically remote. While the ancestors were living further south, along the Mongolian border the language experienced a certain amount of influence from Mongolian, due to the close vicinity and interaction between the two groups. After the area was invaded by the Mongolian hordes around the 11th century and they were forced to settle in northern regions the subsequent linguistic influences came from the indigenous groups of the Evenks and Evens. This has resulted in a diverse language which has been influenced by many languages and has as many words of Mongolian origin as Turkic.
Evidence within the language of its former more southern roots can be seen in the word “March”, kulun tutar, the literal meaning being “holding the foals”. The foals were held so that the mare could be milked although the figurative meaning of kulun tutar seems ambiguous when realising that further north in Yakutia the foals are born in May, due to this harsher climate. Therefore this indicates a previous, more southern, warmer origin.
The language was first recorded as a written language in 1692 when the traveller N.Witsen included it in part of his book published in Amsterdam, Holland. It took a further hundred years or so before the Yakut people themselves transcribed their language. Religious literature and folklore texts were put to paper by the Yakut people from 1819 onwards which were phonetically documented. A consistent written form was eventually given to the language in 1851 by Otto N.Böhtlink who included part of literary work “Reminiscences” by A.Y. Uvarovsky and its translation in his book “About the Yakut Language”. He used an alphabet based on Cyrillic, with additional distinguishing features. As time progressed another alteration was made to the method of transcription. S.A.Novgorodov developed a version of the Latin alphabet appropriate for Yakut in 1922 which was replaced by a new Latin alphabet in 1929. After all these changes the script that can be recognized today as that of Yakut is a Cyrillic script based on Russian which was introduced in 1939. As yet the written form has not been changed and roughly 95% of the people are literate in this script.
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