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

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