Nogai

Nogai is a Turkic language spoken in southwestern Russia. It is closely related to Crimean Tatar and Turkish, and is written in a Cyrillic alphabet. Nogai is spoken by about 500,000 people, mostly in the Nogai Steppe of Dagestan and Karachay-Cherkessia. It is also spoken in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. The Nogai language has three dialects: Khoshuud, Terek, and Nogai. The Nogai alphabet is based on the Cyrillic script and uses 28 letters. The alphabet was created in the 1930s by Nogai intellectuals who wanted to distance themselves from the Arabic script used by the Tatars. Nogai is an agglutinative language, meaning that words are formed by adding suffixes to roots. For example, the word for "horse" is at, and the word for "rider" is atly. The word for "horseman" is atlyq, formed by adding the suffix -q to atly. Nogai has a rich oral tradition, and many of its folktales and poems have been collected and published. The Nogai also have a unique form of music called komuz, which is played on a three-stringed instrument.