Shor language

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Shor
Шор тили šor tili, Тадар тили tadar tili
Spoken in: Russia 
Region: Kemerovo
Total speakers: 9,800
Language family: Altaic[1] (controversial)
 Turkic
  Northern
   Shor
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: tut
ISO 639-3: cjs

The Shor language (Shor: Шор тили, Russian: Шорский язык) is one of the Turkic languages. It is spoken by around 10,000 people in the Kemerovo Oblast in south-central Siberia. Not all ethnic Shors speak Shor, and the language witnessed a decline from the late thirties to the early nineties. However, the dissolution of the Soviet Union saw signs of Shor lingual revival. The language is now being taught at the Novokuznetsk branch of the Kemerovo State University.

Shor language was not mentioned in ISO 639, an international standard that lists short codes for language names, until it was included as cjs in the recent edition ISO 639-3.

Like its neighbor languages, the language borrows a great number of roots from the Mongolian language as well as words from the Russian language. The two main dialects are Mrasu and Kondoma, named after the districts where they are spoken. Differences between these dialects are small.

It is written with a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet, which was introduced by Christian missionaries in the middle of the 19th century.

To highlight the endangered status of the language, Gennady Kostochakov recently published a book of poems in Shor entitled, "I am the Last Shor Poet."[2]

Contents

[edit] Morphology and syntax

[edit] Pronouns

Shor has seven personal pronouns:

Personal pronouns
Singular Plural
Shor (transliteration) English Shor (transliteration) English
мен (men) I пис (pis) we
сен (sen) you (singular) силер/слер (siler/sler) you (plural, formal)
ол (ol) he/she/it ылар/лар, олар/алар (ılar/lar, olor/alar) they (animate?)
пылар/плар (pılar/plar) they (inanimate?)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "[1] Ethnologue"
  2. ^ Staff writer. "The dying fish swims in water", The Economist, December 24 2005 - January 6 2006, pp. 73-74. 

[edit] References

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