Written Texts in Unwritten Languages as a Sociolinguistic Phenome- non (On the Material of the Chalkan and Alyutor Languages)

Abstract

The Chalkan and Alyutor languages are not related, however their current conditions are simlar, meaning that they exist in comparable sociolin- guistic environments of uneven bi- and triligualism. The writing systems of the- se unwritten languages are still being developed, which is being further compli- cated by the influence of the writing norms of the dominant languages. The handwritten and published materials in Chalkan and Alyutor demonstrate the variety in graphic forms of national texts. The choice of graphemes for the spe- cific sounds of national speech is also a major issue. For the Alyutor writing system, the graphic representations of the super-short vowel [ә], the fricative [ɣ], the glottal stop [ʔ] and the epiglottal stop [ʕ] have not yet been developed. In the following article, we present the analysis of three versions of Alyutor writing systems developed by native Alyutor speakers M. I. Popov, M. V. Nu- tayulgin, A. A. Sorokin. The problem of graphic variety of the written form of the Chalkan languages stems from the following two reasons: the absence of graphemes for specific Chalkan sounds ғ [ɣі], җ [ʒ”], қ [q], њ [n’] and the in- fluence of the Standard Altai orthographic norms.