Tat language (Caucasus)

Tat, also known as Caucasian Persian, Tat/Tati Persian, or Caucasian Tat, and spoken by the Tats in Azerbaijan and Russia.

General information

The Tats are an indigenous Iranian people in the Caucasus who trace their origin to the Sassanid-period migrants from Iran (ca. fifth century AD).

Tat is endangered, classified as "severely endangered" by UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.  Most scholars divide Tat into two primary varieties: Jewish and Muslim, with religious differences correlating with linguistic differences. According to him, The Great Russian Encyclopedia of 1901 gives the number of Tati speakers in 1901 as 135,000.

Speakers

According to the 1989 Soviet census, 30,000 Tats lived in the Soviet Union, of which 10,000 were in Azerbaijan.

The adults in most of the mountain and foothill communities reported they use Tat as their main language of interaction. They speak Tat with each other, but speak Azerbaijani with their children so that they will learn the language before beginning school. If the wife in the family is non-Tat speaking, however, the family is most likely to use Azerbaijani in the home. In the villages of Lahıc and Zǝyvǝ, women who marry in are reported to learn Tat.

Phonology

The following information is of the dialect of Apsheron:

Consonants

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"

! colspan="2" |

!Labial

!Dental/ Alveolar

!Post- alveolar

!Palatal

!Velar

!Glottal

! rowspan="2" |Plosive

!voiceless

|()

!voiced

! rowspan="2" |Affricate

!voiceless

!voiced

! rowspan="2" |Fricative

!voiceless

!voiced

|()

! colspan="2" |Nasal

! colspan="2" |Trill

! colspan="2" |Approximant

Stop sounds /t, d/ are phonetically dental as [t̪, d̪]
/ʒ/ is mainly heard from loanwords.
Velar fricative sounds /x, ɣ/ can be heard in free variation as uvular fricative sounds [χ, ʁ].
/k/ is heard as palatal [c] when preceding front vowels, and occurs as velar [k] elsewhere.
Sounds /ʒ, d͡ʒ/ can also be heard as retroflex sounds [ʐ, d͡ʐ].

Vowels

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"

! colspan="2" |Front

!Back

!High

!Mid

!Low

| colspan="2" |

A back-unrounded vowel /ɯ/, can also appear, but only as a result of Azeri loanwords.

Writing system

Tat was not written until 1935. Efforts are being made at preservation. "Since 1996, the Azerbaijani government has provided money for the development of minority languages, including Tat. Haciyev (personal communication) reports that Tat classes have been started in several schools in the Quba region using an alphabet based on the current Azerbaijani Latin alphabet."