Previous installments: Occitan, Luxembourgish, Catalan, Faroese
As you can see by the previous entries, LotW has thus far been rather eurocentric. Not only that, but the languages presented thus far have perhaps not been particularly obscure, but are in fact quite well known. In an effort to counter that, it's time to head out east for this week's language: Kumyk.
Kumyk is a Turkic language, spoken primarily in the troubled Russian republic of Dagestan (okay, technically that's still in Europe, but it's a step in the right direction). It's spoken by some 300,000 people in that region and in small communities in Chechnya, Turkey, Syria and Iran. There are several closely related languages spoken in nearby regions, such as Nogai and Karachay-Balkar. Kumyk has also been heavily influenced by the major languages of the region, such as Azerbaijani and Russian, and bears many a ressemblance with Turkish (which is hardly surprising, given its classification as a Turkic language).
Both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets are currently in use when writing Kumyk; by 2010 it's planned that the Latin alphabet will be used exclusively. Written Kumyk has at time also used the Arabic alphabet. The Latin alphabet currently in use are based on the Turkish alphabet, containing such special characters as ş and ğ.
The Rosetta Project has samples of Kumyk, along with grammar and orthography.
The English Wikipedia entry consists of about three sentences, so this time I suggest brushing up on your German instead. In what appears to be Russian I also found this article, which may be of use to some (ironically it appears to have been written by a Finn).
