The Talking Khakas Phrasebook

The Talking Phrasebook Series presents useful phrases and words in side-by-side translation and with audio files specifically geared to help students work on listening skills and pronunciation. Each entry below, divided by category, features an English word or phrase in the left column and its Khakas translation in the right, presented in the original Khakas (below) and with an English-friendly transliteration (above).

Khakas is a Turkic language that is now classified as endangered. There are about 73,000 ethnic Khakas people, of which only about 54,000 speak the language. Most live in the Khakas Republic in Russia and the vast majority of Khakas speakers are bilingual in Russian. Younger generations are increasingly shifting to Russian as their primary language. Efforts are being made to preserve and promote the language, including the establishment of Khakas-language schools and cultural institutions within the Republic. Some young people are also now championing their language as a point of national pride and encouraging other Khakas to do the same.

In the center column for each row is a play button. The recorded file will feature first English, then the Khakas in three versions: one slow, one with each syllable broken out, and a last version that will be spoken as it might be overheard in a conversation between native speakers.

Interesting Facts about Khakas

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1. Internet Fame: Although Khakas is an endangered language, new songs in Khakas have gained millions of views on YouTube thanks to the band Otyken.
2. Name: Khakas speakers also refer to their language as “tadar,” a form of the word “tatar.” The name tatar is used by many speakers of Turkic languages to refer to their various languages.
3. Alphabet: The Orkhon-Yenisei monuments show that Khakass was written in a runic alphabet perhaps as early as the 7th Century. The monuments were erected to commemorate the brothers Bilge Khagan (683-734) and Kul-Tegin (684-731), one a civil leader and the other a military commander. By the 9th Century, the runic script was replaced by the Uighur alphabet, which developed from Sogdian. Today, the language is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic script, which was introduced to the region during the Soviet era.
4. Dialects: The modern Khakass language is the result of the historical consolidation of the Kachin, Sagai, Kyzyl, Shor, Koibal, and Beltyr tribal languages. Traces of these languages can be seen in Khakas dialects, which have retained the corresponding names. The Sagai dialect is considered the standard variety and is used in official documents and publications. The resource below uses this dialect. Click here for more on Khakas dialects.
5. Literary Khakass does not completely coincide with any of the dialects and selectively combines the features of phonetics, morphology and vocabulary of different dialect groups.
6. Vowel Harmony: Like other Turkic languages, Khakas has vowel harmony, meaning that the vowels in a word must belong to the same vowel class. Khakas also has agglutinative morphology, where words are formed by adding suffixes to a root. For example, the word palalaryma (“to my children”) consists of the stem pala (“child”) and the affixes lar (plural), ym (“my”) and a (dative).
7. Cases: The Khakas language has ten cases, each with its own affix. These include the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, ablative, allative, instrumental, comparative, and prepositional. Click here for more on Khakas grammar.
8. Tenses: The Khakas language has a rich system of tenses. For time, different conjugations exist for past, immediate past, present, and future. Within these, a system of affixes indicate perfective and imperfective, active and passive, conditional, as well as various situations like when an action is not witnessed by the speaker. Verbs can take up to five affixes to convey the most accurate meaning.
9. Word order: Khakas uses the SOV fixed word order: subject – object – verb. The grammatical use of the word is dependent on its placement in the sentence. For example, Silig khys (“Beautiful girl”) – Khys сіліг (“The girl is beautiful”). Oinapchatkhan pala (“The child who plays”) – Pala oynapchatkhan (“The child played”). The word order of all clauses within a sentence also follow specific rules according to the laws of Turkic syntax: the definition always comes before the defined. For example, the sentence “Ayas tigirdegi puzik turchatkhan kannin sustary appagas harda sagylys turgan” (“The rays of the sun rising in the clear sky sparkled on the white-white snow”) is literally translated as follows: ayas (“clear”) tigirdegi (“located in the sky”) puzik (“high”) turchatkhan (“standing”) kannіn sustary (“sun rays”) appagas (“white-white”) harda (“in the snow”, local case) sagylys turgan (“sparkled”).

Khakas Unique Characters

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Khakas uses the Cyrillic script, which is shared by many other languages in the region. However, it has several characters that are not used in Russian and might be unfamiliar to those who have previously studied languages written in Cyrillic.

Because these characters are typically not available as a default on most computers and telephones, most Khakas use Russian Cyrillic and/or Latin characters to write their language phonetically in a somewhat simplified script. Note that the below resource uses this simplified script.

Here are some examples of Khakas letters that are not held in common with Russian:

Survival Basics

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Introductions in Khakas

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Asking Directions

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Shopping

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Counting

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These are grouped for simplicity – for example 0-10, 11-20, 21-100, 101-1000)

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