Keñsuu Dialect
The Keñsuu dialect (Iradi: Keñsuu shevesi) is an extinct dialect of the Iradi language, formerly spoken in the Keñ-Suu ("wide water") valley on the northern slope of the Talas Alatau, east of Talas. Its last known fluent speaker died in the 1960s. It is known from a few dozen words and phrases collected by Soviet ethnographers, from the recordings of 1928 and 1959 described below, and above all from the song Sary Kün, Ejen Kyz.[1][2]
Features
Keñsuu stood apart from the other Iradi dialects in several ways that linguists attribute to a substrate of the medieval Oghuz, who grazed the Talas basin before the Kipchak-speaking ancestors of the Iradis became dominant there:[2]
- initial g where the other dialects have k, as in göz ("eye") for standard köz;
- a back q and a voiced ğ, written with those letters in the Latin transcriptions of 1928, as in qara ("black") for standard kara and ağyn ("current") for agyn;
- the vowel ä, otherwise found only in the dialects of the Fergana Rim, as in kätte;
- words recorded nowhere else, among them ejen ("gentle, tender"), dööl and barışqor, whose meanings are uncertain.
Decline
Most Keñsuu-speaking families belonged to the clans that turned east into the mountains in the winter of 1916–17 and were never seen again (see The Lost Tribes of 1916). Iradi tradition counts the people of Keñ-Suu among the twelve clans named in the poem The Black Blizzard.[3] The few families who had stayed behind or returned from Xinjiang in 1917–18 found their pastures given to settlers. Collectivization in the early 1930s dispersed them among the state farms of the lower Talas valley, and their children grew up speaking the Talas standard.[1]
In 1928 the ethnographer Yevgeny Sadovnikov, working for the People's Commissariat of Education of the Iradi SSR, recorded songs and word lists in the valley on wax phonograph cylinders. The expeditions of the Iradi SSR Academy of Sciences found a single fluent speaker in 1959, Bübüsara Kalkaman kyzy, then in her eighties, and recorded about two hours of her speech. Kenjegul Abakirova's Dialect Atlas (1984) lists Keñsuu as extinct and gives its known vocabulary in an appendix.[2]
Revival interest
Since the State Archives digitized the 1928 cylinders in 2019, Keñsuu has attracted interest among young speakers of the Iradi language revival, for whom it stands for what the language lost in 1916. Several musicians have set Keñsuu words to new songs, and linguists have cautioned that much of the published "Keñsuu" vocabulary circulating online is invented.[4]
References
- ^ Talas State University Press (2016). Blood on the Snow: The Iradi Clans in the Revolt of 1916. Centenary volume, Talas, pp. 237–252.
- ^ Abakirova, Kenjegul (1984). Dialect Atlas of the Iradi Language. Talas: Academy of Sciences of the Iradi SSR. Appendix 4: "The Keñsuu Dialect (extinct)".
- ^ Central Asian Folklore Society (2021). Epic Cycles and Horseback Chants of the Northern Valleys. Talas State University Press, Talas, pp. 135–158.
- ^ Journal of Central Asian Linguistics (2023). 'Oghuz Traces in the Talas Basin: The Keñsuu Material Reconsidered.' Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 3–29.