Kumyk language

Kumyk (къумукъ тил, qumuq til, قوموق تیل) is a Turkic language spoken by about 520,000 people, mainly by the Kumyks, in the Dagestan, North Ossetia and Chechen republics of the Russian Federation. Until the 20th century Kumyk was the lingua franca of the Northern Caucasus.

Kumyk language belongs to the Kipchak-Cuman subfamily of the Kipchak family of the Turkic languages. It's a descendant of the Cuman language, with likely influence from the Khazar language, and in addition contains words from the Bulghar and Oghuz substratum. The closest languages to Kumyk are Karachay-Balkar, Crimean Tatar, and Karaim languages.

Nikolay Baskakov, based on a 12th-century scripture named Codex Cumanicus, included modern Kumyk, Karachai-Balkar, Crimean Tatar, Karaim, and the language of Mamluk Kipchaks in the linguistic family of the Cuman-Kipchak language. Samoylovich also considered Cuman-Kipchak close to Kumyk and Karachai-Balkar.

Amongst the dialects of the Kumyk there are Kaitag, Terek (Güçük-yurt and Braguny), Buynaksk (Temir-Khan-Shura) and Xasavyurt. The latter two became basis for the literary language.

Kumyk had been a lingua-franca of the bigger part of the Northern Caucasus, from Dagestan to Kabarda, until the 1930s and was an official language of communication between the North-Eastern Caucasian nations and the Russian administration. The language was known in Dagestan as simply Muslim language (Kumyk: бусурман тил, busurman til, بوسورمان تیل) due to its dominant role as the intertribal language of communication among various Muslim communities of the region.

The historian Georgi Derluguian made the following analogy with regards to the role of Turkic languages in the Caucasus and beyond:

“... For almost a thousand years, the Turkic languages that dominated the peoples of the steppe – Kumyk and Tatar – served, like Swahili in East Africa or French among the aristocracies of Europe, as a common lingua franca in the multinational North Caucasus...”

In 1848, a professor of the "Caucasian Tatar" (Kumyk) Timofey Makarov published the first ever grammatical book in the Russian language for one of the Northern Caucasian languages, which was international Kumyk. Makarov wrote: