Social:Urum language

Short description: Kipchak Turkic language

Urum
Урум
Urum written in the Cyrillic script, along with the obsolete Latin and Greek scripts
Pronunciation	Template:IPA-tt
Native to	Ukraine
Ethnicity	Urums (Turkic-speaking Greeks)
Native speakers	190,000 (2000)
Language family	Turkic Common Turkic Kipchak West Kypchak Urum
Dialects	Tsalka North Azovian
Writing system	Cyrillic, Greek
Language codes
ISO 639-3	uum
Glottolog	urum1249
Urum is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (2010)

Urum is a Turkic language spoken by several thousand ethnic Greeks who inhabit a few villages in southeastern Ukraine . 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 ("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. Turkic languages originally did not have /ɾ/ 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 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, Urum is a West Kipchak language and forms a subfamily with the Crimeaic languages (Crimean Tatar and Krymchak).

Phonology

Vowels

	Front		Back
	unrounded	rounded	unrounded	rounded
Close	i	ü /y/	ı /ɯ/	u
Close-mid	e			o
Near-open	ä /æ/	ö /œ/
Open			a

Examples

• šar - city
• äl - hand
• göl - lake
• yel - wind
• yol - road
• it - dog
• üzüg - ring
• ğız - girl
• ğuš - bird

Consonants

		Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m		n		ɲ ⟨nʼ⟩	ŋ
Plosive	voiceless	p		t		c ⟨tʼ⟩	k
	voiced	b		d		ɟ ⟨dʼ⟩	g
Affricate	voiceless			(ts)	tʃ ⟨č⟩
	voiced				dʒ ⟨ǰ⟩
Fricative	voiceless	f	(θ)	s	ʃ ⟨š⟩		x ⟨h⟩	h
	voiced	v	(ð)	z	ʒ ⟨ž⟩		ɣ ⟨ğ⟩
Approximant		(w)				j
Lateral	plain			l
	velarized			ɫ
Flap				ɾ		ɾʲ ⟨rʼ⟩

/θ, ð/ appear solely in loanwords from Greek. /t͡s/ appears in loanwords. [w] can be an allophone of /v/ after vowels.

Writing system

А а	Б б	В в	Г г	Ғ ғ	Д д	(Δ δ)	Д′ д′
(Ђ ђ)	Е е	Ж ж	Җ җ	З з	И и	Й й	К к
Л л	М м	Н н	Ң ң	О о	Ӧ ӧ	П п	Р р
С с	Т т	Т′ т′	(Ћ ћ)	У у	Ӱ ӱ	Υ υ	Ф ф
Х х	Һ һ	Ц ц	Ч ч	Ш ш	Щ щ	Ъ ъ	Ы ы
Ь ь	Э э	Ю ю	Я я	Ѳ ѳ

In an Urum primer issued in Kyiv in 2008, the following alphabet is suggested:

А а	Б б	В в	Г г	Ґ ґ	Д д	Д' д'	Дж дж
Е е	З з	И и	Й й	К к	Л л	М м	Н н
О о	Ӧ ӧ	П п	Р р	С с	Т т	Т' т'	У у
Ӱ ӱ	Ф ф	Х х	Ч ч	Ш ш	Ы ы	Э э

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.

External links

• Urum DoReCo corpus compiled by Stavros Skopeteas, Violeta Moisidi, Nutsa Tsetereli, Johanna Lorenz and Stefanie Schröter. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and time-aligned morphological annotations.