You don't order Tatar sauce for your Filet-o-Fish!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/08/17 14:13 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/08/17/704559.aspx


What does the татарча (Tatar) language have in common with اردو, മലയാളം, Qhichwa Simi, فارسی, isiZulu, ಕನ್ನಡ, नेपाली, Afrikaans, कोंकणी, Setswana, বাংলা, తెలుగుਪੰਜਾਬੀ, and Lëtzebuergisch ?

That's easy.... it too has a Language Interface Pack, available for download right here!

Some background info on Tatar (courtesy of Soren):

Number of speakers:  6-7 million

Name in the language itself: татарча

The Tatar language is one of the two official languages of the republic of Tatarstan in the Russian Federation (Russian being the other one). Tatar is spoken there by around 5.7 million speakers; smaller communities of Tatar speakers can be found in neighboring regions like Bashqortostan, in southwestern Siberia and in central Asia and eastern Europe.

During the Soviet era, Tatar lost ground to Russian; it is estimated that in the last 30 years of the Soviet Union more than 8 percent of the population of Tatarstan switched from Tatar to Russian as their preferred language. The language of high education as well as the mass media is still predominantly Russian, and in urban areas more Russian is heard. But the Tatar language is being promoted by an active language policy in the republic, and since the end of the 20th century there has been a renaissance of the language.

Tatar has a large number of dialects, which can be classified into three major groups: Central, Western/Misharian and Eastern/Siberian. Modern standard Tatar shows features mostly of both the Central dialects (especially in lexicon, phonology) and the Western/Misharian dialects (more in morphology).

Tatar is an agglutinative language.

Fun facts:

Classification: Tatar belongs to the Northern Kypchak branch of the Turkic languages, which might belong to the (disputed) Altaic language family. The classification of Tatar itself is not undisputed either (as for most Turkic languages). The closest relative of Tatar is Bashkir, other relatives include Crimean Tatar or Kazakh.

Script: Until the late 1920s Tatar was written in a modified Arabic script (which did not suit Tatar very well and imposed very complex spelling rules). The Latin alphabet introduced then was replaced by a Cyrillic one already in 1939. The second introduction of a Latin alphabet, which was made official in September 2001, was reverted by the Russian Supreme Court. Therefore today Tatar is written in a Cyrillic script with 6 special characters unknown in Russian.

Enjoy!

 

This post brought to you by т (U+0442, a.k.a. CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER TE)


# RubenP on 17 Aug 2006 4:29 PM:

Imagine that, the courts deciding the spelling of your language... 8-|

# Marc Brooks on 17 Aug 2006 5:05 PM:

Any idea when we'll get some more localizations for the .Net 2.0 runtime?  We're hovering at 24.  Also, who do I whine at to get them all bundled into one download that doesn't require me to randomly guess which L2R or R2L button I'm supposed to click on in the installation screen I can't read?  [thise message previously recorded]

# Lauren Smith on 17 Aug 2006 9:40 PM:

I once ordered tartar for my taters in Tatar. The guy said "Cut it out, turkey"

# RAM PRASAD on 18 Aug 2006 4:08 PM:

If I want to create localized web site with english and telugu what are my options. Do I need to install Telugu LIP on the web server and use the loclization framework in ASP.NET.

# Michael S. Kaplan on 18 Aug 2006 4:48 PM:

You do not need to have the LIP at all to do this -- you would simply use the localization framework in .NET and build Telugu resources.

The LIP is for getting Windows localized into a language....

# Michael S. Kaplan on 18 Aug 2006 4:55 PM:

Hi Lauren -- groan!

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