Urum language

Urum is a Turkic language spoken by several thousand people who inhabit a few villages in the Southeastern Ukraine and in diaspora communities worldwide. The Urum language is often considered a variant of the Crimean Tatar language.

The name Urum is derived from Rûm ("Rome"), the term for the Byzantine empire in the Muslim world. The Ottoman Empire used it to describe non-Muslims within the empire. The initial vowel in Urum is prosthetic: originally Turkic languages did not have /ɾ/ in the word-initial position, and in borrowed words used to add a vowel before it. The common use of the term Urum appears to have led to some confusion, as most Turkish-speaking Greeks were called Urum. The Turkish-speaking population in Georgia is often confused with the distinct community in Ukraine.^[2][3] (see: Urums)

Sounds

Consonants

(1) /ts/ is found only in loanwords.

(2) /θ/ and /ð/ are found only in loanwords from Greek.

Writing System

A few manuscripts are known to be written in Urum using Greek characters.^[4] During the period between 1927 and 1937, the Urum language was written in reformed Latin characters, the New Turkic Alphabet, and used in local schools; at least one primer is known to have been printed. In 1937 the use of written Urum stopped. Alexander Garkavets uses the following alphabet:^[5]

In an Urum primer issued in Kiev in 2008 the following alphabet is suggested: ^[6]

Publications

Very little has been published on the Urum language. There exists a very small lexicon,^[7] and a small description of the language.^[8] For Caucasian Urum, there is a language documentation project that collected a dictionary,^[9] a set of grammatically relevant clausal constructions,^[10] and a text corpus.^[11] The website of the project contains issues about language and history.^[12]

References