Subordination in Kazakh as Spoken in China

Turkic is one of the world’s major language families and is spoken across a wide area from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. Turkic languages, such as Kazakh and Turkish share many common features. For example, they usually follow a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, and their sentence structure is typically left-branching and head-final, meaning the predicate comes last. In these languages, subordinate clauses (such as “when he came” or “that she knows” or “who is a teacher”) are formed with special verb forms such as participles, verbal nouns and converbs. These forms function like the words “that,” “when” or “because” in English and help to show how one part of a sentence depends on another. Kazakh, a Turkic language spoken in Central Asia, follows these typical patterns. However, some urban Kazakh varieties spoken in China show new ways of forming sentences due to contact with Chinese, such as the use of conjunctions and word order that are atypical for Turkic languages. Subordination in Kazakh as spoken in China explores how subordinate clauses are formed in Kazakh, how they compare to those in other Turkic languages like Turkish, and what new strategies may have developed under the influence of Chinese. Since Kazakh syntax is less researched than Turkish, this study offers fresh insights into Turkic sentence structure. Special focus will be on the inflectional suffixes that carry meaning and help to link main and subordinate clauses in complex sentences. The results help us to better understand how languages change through contact, how core grammar patterns shift over time and how cross-linguistic features of subordination manifest themselves in Kazakh.