Linguistic Characteristics of Black Sea Turks in Kyrgyzstan: An Assessment in Terms of Phonology and Morphology

Abstract

The Black Sea Turks living in Kyrgyzstan constitute one of the Turkish communities deported from Batumi and its surrounding region to Central Asia during the Soviet deportations of 1944. Despite approximately eighty years of residence in a multilingual environment, this community has preserved many features of the historical Black Sea dialects while simultaneously developing new linguistic characteristics through contact with Kyrgyz and Russian. This study examines the phonological and morphological characteristics of the speech of the Black Sea Turks living in Kökcar village of Osh Province, Kyrgyzstan. The research is based on spoken language data collected from fifty informants through fieldwork. The recordings were transcribed according to the transcription system of the Turkish Language Association and analysed using a descriptive linguistic approach. The findings reveal that vowel length, secondary vowel lengthening, consonant loss, voicing, devoicing and syllable contraction remain productive phonological features of the dialect. Morphological analysis indicates that although the dialect largely preserves the grammatical structure of Türkiye Turkish, it also displays distinctive regional characteristics, particularly in present tense markers, personal suffixes and nominal inflections. The study demonstrates that the language of the Black Sea Turks has maintained its structural integrity despite prolonged language contact and migration, thereby providing significant evidence for the preservation of linguistic identity in diaspora communities.