The Shor language (Шор тили) is a Turkic language spoken by about 10,000 people in the Kemerovo Province in south-central Siberia. In the history of the Turkic states and China, Shors played an important role, mostly connected with their offshoot Shatuo. Presently, not all ethnic Shors speak Shor, and the language suffered a decline from the late 1930s to the early 1990s. However, the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought about the Shor lingual revival. The language is now taught at the Novokuznetsk branch of the Kemerovo State University.
Like its neighbor languages, the language has borrowed a great number of roots from the Mongolian language, as well as words from the Russian language. The two main dialects are Mrasu and Kondoma, named after the districts where they are spoken. Differences between these dialects are small.
Shor was first written with a Cyrillic alphabet introduced by Christian missionaries in the middle of the 19th century. After a number of changes, the modern Shor alphabet is another Cyrillic alphabet.
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