Abstract
Kazan Tatar is a Kipchak language spoken in the Republic of Tatarstan (Ethnologue). Previous literature has described a backness harmony system, with weak rounding harmony in the mid vowels (Comrie 1997, Berta 1998, Poppe 1968). This work utilizes novel data to investigate Tatar’s harmony under an Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky 1993) framework, contributing new observations regarding the lack of rounding harmony in Tatar, contrary to previous accounts. Through investigation of Tatar’s harmony system, we gain insight into the workings of the language’s phonology and find crucial evidence for the gradual decay of rounding harmony in Turkic languages.
Highlights
Kazan Tatar, known as Volga Tatar, or more Tatar, is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in the Republic of Tatarstan in the Russian Federation (Ethnologue)
Conklin’s 2015 thesis on long distance vowel assimilatory processes in Kazan Tatar was extremely helpful in conducting these analyses, as we found similar results
Kazan Tatar’s vowel system has harmony processes sensitive to features of backness, but not roundness nor other noticeable features. This coupled with Conklin 2015 is contrary to previous accounts which have attested rounding harmony to be present to some extent in the mid vowels
Summary
Kazan Tatar, known as Volga Tatar, or more Tatar, is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in the Republic of Tatarstan in the Russian Federation (Ethnologue). Tatar’s orthographic system is a modified Cyrillic alphabet, as Russian law mandates the use of Cyrillic for all official state languages. In the past, it has been written in Latin and Arabic scripts. The speakers are not related, do not know each other, and both grew up in Kazan, Tatarstan. Both speakers were monolingual until around five years old, approximately when they entered school and began to learn Russian. An initial analysis was conducted on the first speaker’s data and verified by the transcribed data of the second
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