The Use of Pronouns in the Language of Kazi Maulik’s Works

The linguistic heritage of the Karakalpak poet Kazi Maulik Bekmukhammad uly occupies a significant place in the history of Turkic literary language and provides valuable material for studying the historical development of grammatical categories. Among these categories, pronouns represent one of the most stable yet dynamically evolving components of the language system. This study examines the semantic, lexical, and grammatical characteristics of pronouns used in Kazi Maulik’s poetic works. The research aims to identify the structural features of personal, demonstrative, interrogative, reflexive, collective, indefinite, negative, and definitive pronouns and to compare them with their counterparts in modern Karakalpak. The analysis is based on descriptive, comparative-historical, and structural-linguistic methods applied to the poet’s manuscripts and published texts. The findings reveal that Kazi Maulik extensively employed both common Turkic and archaic pronominal forms inherited from the Central Asian written literary tradition. Several pronoun variants no longer used in the modern Karakalpak literary language have been preserved in his works and partially survive in regional dialects. The study also demonstrates historical variation in case inflection, phonetic development, and semantic functions of pronouns. These observations contribute to understanding the evolution of Karakalpak grammatical structure and provide new evidence for the continuity between Old Turkic written traditions and the modern Karakalpak language. The results are relevant for Turkic historical linguistics, comparative grammar, and the study of the development of literary languages.