Niğde Altay Köyü’nde Dil İlişkisi Araştırması

Abstract

Nowadays, it is assumed that about 20,000 Kazakh Turks live in Turkey. These Kazakh people migrated from Altay to Anatolia about seventy years ago. Whereas in 1935, the migration of the Kazakhs started with 20.000 people, only 1400 Kazakh migrants could reach to Turkey in 1952 due to war, disease and hunger. Today, Kazakh people live in different districts of Turkey, such as Zeytinburnu in Istanbul, Salihli in Manisa, Ulukishla district in Nigde, Ismil-Eregli in Konya, Develi-Yahyalı-Yeshilhisar districts in Kayseri and Sultankhan village in Aksaray. A significant part of them continued to preserve their own language and culture. However, as Kazakh language is under the influence of Turkish, which is first tongue, there are different variations from the standard Kazakh spoken language. Altay Village, in the district of Ulukyshla in Nigde, is one of the places where the Kazakh population are gathered together. Today, there are about 25 families and around 125 Kazakhs living in the village. This village is the only village in Turkey, where only Kazakh people live. Nevertheless, there are differences in the relationship with the native language. The focus of this study was to investigate the relationship between Turkish and Kazakh languages. For this reason, the answers to the following questions were researched:  What are the typical characteristics of Kazakh language of Altay village?  What is the situation of spoken languages in the society?  What is the relationship between Turkish language?  How do two languages influence each other?  Are there differences in the trace of language relationship between different generations?  ,As a result of language relationship, is Altay Village’s Kazakh language under the danger of extinction? While searching for the answers to these questions of the thesis, language associations are examined on the basis of the copying model developed by Lars Johanson. The ones related to the language extinction were examined according to the criteria established by the relevant literature survey. For this Thesis study, a field research was carried out, the voice recordings were taken from the different age groups’ people living there, and a language examination was made on the collections. At the end of the study, we tried to give general information on the changes occurred between two kindred languages lived together and the condition of Kazakh language extinction.