The Shor language is a Turkic language

Turkic languages

The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...

 spoken by about 10,000 people in the Kemerovo Province

Kemerovo Oblast

Kemerovo Oblast , also known as Kuzbass after the Kuznetsk Basin, is a federal subject of Russia , located in southwestern Siberia, where the West Siberian Plain meets the South Siberian mountains...

 in south-central Siberia

Siberia

Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...

. In the history of the Turkic states and China, Shors played an important role, mostly connected with their offshoot Shatuo

Shatuo

The Shatuo were a Turkic tribe that heavily influenced northern Chinese politics from the late ninth century through the tenth century. They are noted for founding 3 of the 5 dynasties and 1 of the kingdoms during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period....

. Presently, not all ethnic Shors

Shors

Shors or Shorians are a Turkic people in the Kemerovo Oblast in Russia. Their self designation is Шор, or Shor. They were also called Kuznetskie Tatars , Kondoma Tatars , Mras-Su Tatars in some of the documents of the 17th-18th centuries.Most of Shors live in the Tom basin along the Kondoma and...

 speak Shor, and the language suffered a decline from the late 1930s to the early 1990s. However, the dissolution of the Soviet Union

Dissolution of the Soviet Union

The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the disintegration of the federal political structures and central government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , resulting in the independence of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union between March 11, 1990 and December 25, 1991...

 brought about the Shor lingual revival. The language is now being taught at the Novokuznetsk

Novokuznetsk

Novokuznetsk is a city in Kemerovo Oblast, Russia. It serves as the administrative center of Novokuznetsky District, but it is not administratively a part of it...

 branch of the Kemerovo State University

Kemerovo State University

The Kemerovo State University was established in 1973 as a successor to Kemerovo Pedagogical Institute. It is a leading educational and scientific center of Kemerovo Oblast with five branches throughout the region in Belovo, Anzhero-Sudzhensk, Novokuznetsk, Prokopyevsk, and in Ulan Bator...

.

Shor language was not initially included in ISO 639

ISO 639

ISO 639 is a set of standards by the International Organization for Standardization that is concerned with representation of names for language and language groups....

, an international standard

International standard

International standards are standards developed by international standards organizations. International standards are available for consideration and use, worldwide...

 that lists short codes for language names, until it was included as cjs in the recent edition ISO 639-3

ISO 639-3

ISO 639-3:2007, Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages, is an international standard for language codes in the ISO 639 series. The standard describes three‐letter codes for identifying languages. It extends the ISO 639-2...

.

Like its neighbor languages, the language has borrowed a great number of roots from the Mongolian language

Mongolian language

The Mongolian language is the official language of Mongolia and the best-known member of the Mongolic language family. The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the Mongolian residents of the Inner...

, as well as words from the Russian language

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

. The two main dialects are Mrasu and Kondoma, named after the districts where they are spoken. Differences between these dialects are small.

It is written with a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

, which was introduced by Christian missionaries in the middle of the 19th century.

To highlight the endangered status of the language, Gennady Kostochakov recently published a book of poems in Shor entitled, "I am the Last Shor Poet."

Pronouns

Shor has seven personal pronouns:

Personal pronouns

Singular		Plural
Shor (transliteration)	English	Shor (transliteration)	English
мен (men)	I	пис (pis)	we
сен (sen)	you (singular)	силер/слер (siler/sler)	you (plural, formal)
ол (ol)	he/she/it	ылар/лар, олар/алар (ılar/lar, olor/alar)	they (animate?)
		пылар/плар (pılar/plar)	they (inanimate?)