No abstract

The purpose of the study is to determine the status of the Kypchak language in the political, social and intellectual history of Egypt during the period of Mamluks’ rule.To clarify the situation, we have made an overview of the few primary and secondary sources that deal with the functioning of the Turks’ language and the analysis of its role and place in the Egyptian medieval society from the historical, religious and cultural positions. Metaphorically, the Kypchak language was the barrier language separating the social group of former slaves from the local population of Egypt and providing the right to a special position, up to the possibility of occupying the highest office of power. It also helped not to dissolve in a much larger society of Egyptians and to maintain the identity, the main component of which it was. However, the dominance of the military caste of the Mamluks did not engender language conflicts in medieval Egypt. Despite the cultural differences between the social groups - the Turkic military elite and the bulk of the Egyptian population, the devaluation of local dialects and languages has not occurred. Moreover, the Mamluk rulers have even strengthened the status of the Classical Arabic by their strong support of the material and spiritual Islamic culture and infrastructure. However, the Kypchak language did not lose its positions remaining the language of communication not only of the Turks but also of the Türkicized Caucasian and Mongolian ethnic groups.We believe that the study of the language of the medieval Turkic world can be more productive if we include an interdisciplinary approach to the methodology of its study and not only Eastern but European sources as well.

<p>The purpose of our work was to analyze the ethnic realities of the Kipchak language in order to establish its similarities and differences with modern Turkic languages for which this medieval language was a proto-language. The written medieval manuscript in Arabic “Al-Tuhfa al-Zakiyya fi al-Lugha al-Turkiyyah” (Genuine wonder about the Turkish language) was one of the most important and most valuable source for studying the Kipchak language. The main feature of the work was that the original version was written in the Kipchak, as the anonymous author pointed out on the first page of the manuscript, stored in Istanbul, in the Beyazit state library. When studying objects that were far apart from each other in a temporary sense, such as medieval and modern languages, we used the comparative-historical method, and as a result concluded that in some cases there were only phonetic differences, while the syntactic and semantic commonality of lexical and phraseological units persisted. To classify ethnic realities, the statistical method of analysis was used. Ethnographic, cultural and mental realities testified to direct kinship and a single nomadic culture of the speakers of the languages of this group and provided an opportunity to restore the historical stages of the development of the Turkic languages from the Middle Ages to the present day.</p>