| Homshetsi / Homshetsma | |
|---|---|
| Հոմշեցի / Հոմշեցմա | |
| Spoken in | Russia, Turkey, Georgia (Abkhazia), Armenia, and Central Asia. |
| Native speakers | 14,000 (date missing) |
| Language family |
Indo-European
|
| Writing system | Armenian alphabet, modified Turkish alphabet |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
|
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Homshetsi (Հոմշեցի - Homshetsi lizu, Homshetsma, "the Hamshen language"; Turkish: Hemşince) is an archaic Western Armenian dialect spoken by the Eastern group and the Northern group of Hamshenis (Hemshinli), an ethnic group living in northeastern Turkey, Abkhazia and Russia.
It is practically a dialect and mutually intelligible with Armenian. However, due to its speakers' distinct profile, it is widely regarded as an ethnolect. It is not a written language and a slightly modified Turkish alphabet in Turkey and Armenian alphabet (by Christian immigrants from Hamshen who refer to the language as Homshetsma (Հոմշեցմա)) in Russia and Abkhazia are used for limited purposes. A sub-dialect is spoken in Eşmekaya (Ardala) village in Hopa.
Hemşince is a spoken language amongst the Eastern Hemshinli, also known as the Hopa Hemshinli, who live in a small number of villages in Turkey's Artvin province. The Western Hemshinli, a related but geographically separate group living in Rize province, also spoke it until sometime in the 19th century. They now speak only Turkish but preserve within it many Hemşince loanwords.[1] A third group, the northern Homshentsik, who live in, also speak a variety of Homshetsma.
The language existed only in spoken form until 1995, when the linguist Bert Vaux designed an orthographic system for it based on the Turkish alphabet.
Hemşince/Homshetsma has linguistic features that indicate it belongs to the western Armenian dialect group; however, the two are generally not mutually intelligible.[2] Hemşince has close ties to the Armenian dialects formerly found in north-eastern Turkey, in particular in Hodorchur and, to a lesser extent, in Trebizond. Because of its extended isolation Hemşince also contains many archaisms that set it apart from all other Armenian dialects. The language preserves forms found only in Classical and Middle Armenian, and at the same time preserves foreign (especially Arab and Turkish) grammatical and lexical components that were stripped from modern Armenian during the twentieth century. "Homshetsma therefore gives us one of our only glimpses of Armenian in its 'pure' form", writes Bert Vaux.
UNESCO has categorised Hemşince/Homshetsma as a language that is definitely endangered.[3]