by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/08/27 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/08/27/10054882.aspx
THE WINDOWS 7 TATAR LANGUAGE INTERFACE PACK IS LIVE!
Woo hoo! :-)
Click here to download the Tatar Windows 7 LIP via the Microsoft.com Download Center.
Please note that the Tatar Windows 7 LIP can only be installed on a system that runs a Russian client version of Windows 7. It is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems on the Download Center.
A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON TATAR:
NUMBER OF SPEAKERS:
6-7 million speakers
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). 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 post-Soviet 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 and phonology) and the Western/Misharian dialects (more in morphology).
FUN FACTS:
Click here for more information about the Tatar language
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.
Click here for more information about Tatar classification
SCRIPT:
Until the late 1920s Tatar was written in a modified Arabic script (which did not suit Tatar 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 which argued that for maintaining unity in Russia a unified script is necessary. Therefore Tatar is written in a Cyrillic script with 6 special characters unknown in Russian.
Click here for more information about the Tatar script
Enjoy!