Crimean Tatar

This book is intended as a short grammar of present-day Crimean Tatar. Crimean Tatar is an understudied language of the West Kipchak branch of the Northwestern subgroup of the Turkic language family (Johanson 1998).1 Crimean Tatar is spoken mainly in Ukraine's Crimean peninsula and in Uzbekistan, as well as in small communities in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. According to traditional descriptions, Crimean Tatar is subdivided into three dialects: Southern (or Coastal), Central, and Northern (or Steppe) (Berta 1998a). The Central dialect is now used as the standard variety, while the number of speakers of the other two dialects is rapidly diminishing. The description presented in this book is based on the grammatical system of the Central dialect; however, dialectal differences are discussed where possible.
The unique sociolinguistic situation of Crimean Tatar must be taken into consideration by any study that concerns the language. In 1944, the entire Tatar population of Crimea was deported to Central Asia (mainly to Uzbekistan, but also to Kazakhstan and Tajikistan), and to several locations in Russia. As a result, speakers of
the three Crimean Tatar dialects, which used to be linguistically homogenous, were separated, mixed, and immersed into radically different language environments