Urum is a
Turkic language spoken by several thousand
ethnic Greeks who inhabit a few villages in
Georgia
Georgia most commonly refers to:
* Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia
* Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States
Georgia may also refer to:
Places
Historical states and entities
* Related to the ...
and southeastern
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inva ...
. Over the past few generations, there has been a deviation from teaching children Urum to the more common languages of the region, leaving a fairly limited number of new speakers. The Urum language is often considered a variant of
Crimean Tatar.
Name and etymology
The name ''
Urum'' is derived from ''
Rûm
Rūm ( ar, روم , collective; singulative: Rūmī ; plural: Arwām ; fa, روم Rum or Rumiyān, singular Rumi; tr, Rûm or , singular ), also romanized as ''Roum'', is a derivative of the Aramaic (''rhπmÈ'') and Parthian (''frwm'') ...
'' ("Rome"), the term for the
Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...
in the Muslim world. The
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire, * ; is an archaic version. The definite article forms and were synonymous * and el, Оθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία, Othōmanikē Avtokratoria, label=none * info page on book at Martin Luther University ...
used it to describe non-Muslims within the empire. The initial vowel in Urum is
prosthetic. Turkic languages originally did not have in the word-initial position and so in borrowed words, it 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
Georgia most commonly refers to:
* Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia
* Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States
Georgia may also refer to:
Places
Historical states and entities
* Related to the ...
is often confused with the distinct community in Ukraine.
Classification
Urum is a
Turkic language belonging to the
Kipchak branch of the family. According to ''
Glottolog
''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute f ...
'', Urum is a West Kipchak language and forms a subfamily with the
Crimeaic languages (
Crimean Tatar and
Krymchak).
Phonology
Vowels
Examples
* - city
* - hand
* - lake
* - wind
* - road
* - dog
* - ring
* - girl
* - bird
Consonants
/θ, ð/ appear solely in loanwords from
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
. /t͡s/ appears in loanwords.
can be an allophone of /v/ after vowels.
Writing system
A few manuscripts are known to be written in Urum using
Greek characters. 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:
In an Urum primer issued in
Kyiv
Kyiv, also spelled Kiev, is the capital and most populous city of Ukraine. It is in north-central Ukraine along the Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2021, its population was 2,962,180, making Kyiv the seventh-most populous city in Europe.
Ky ...
in 2008, the following alphabet is suggested:
Publications
Very little has been published on the Urum language. There exists a very small lexicon, and a small description of the language.
For Caucasian Urum, there is a language documentation project that collected a dictionary, a set of grammatically relevant clausal constructions, and a text corpus. The website of the project contains issues about language and history.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Urum Language
Agglutinative languages
Kipchak languages
Pontic Greeks
Languages of Ukraine
Pontic Greek culture
Turkic languages