Urum language

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Urum
Урум
Urum written in the Cyrillic script, along with the obsolete Latin and Greek scripts
Pronunciation	[uˈrum]
Native to	Ukraine
Ethnicity	Urums (Turkic-speaking Greeks)
Native speakers	190,000 (2000)[1]
Language family	Turkic Common Turkic Kipchak West Kypchak Urum
Dialects	Tsalka North Azovian
Writing system	Cyrillic, Greek
Official status
Recognised minority language in	Ukraine[2]
Language codes
ISO 639-3	uum
Glottolog	urum1249
ELP	Urum
Urum is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (2010)
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Urum (Урум, Ουρούμ) 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.^[3] The Urum language is often considered a variant of Crimean Tatar.

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 prothetic. Turkic languages originally did not have /ɾ/ in word-initial position, and so in borrowed words they 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.^[4][5]

Urum is a Turkic language belonging to the West Kipchak branch of the family. Johanson (2021) classifies it as a variety of Crimean Tatar.^[6]

• šar - city^[7]
• äl - hand
• göl - lake
• yel - wind
• yol - road
• it - dog
• üzüg - ring
• ğız - girl
• ğuš - bird

/θ, ð/ appear solely in loanwords from Greek. /t͡s/ appears in loanwords. [w] can be an allophone of /v/ after vowels.^[7][8]

A few manuscripts are known to be written in Urum using Greek characters.^[9] 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. In 2000, Alexander Garkavets uses the following alphabet:^[10]

In an Urum primer issued in Kyiv in 2008, the following alphabet is suggested: ^[11]

Very little has been published on the Urum language. There exists a very small lexicon,^[12] and a small description of the language.^[13] For Caucasian Urum, there is a language documentation project that collected a dictionary,^[14] a set of grammatically relevant clausal constructions,^[15] and a text corpus.^[16] The website of the project contains issues about language and history.^[17]

• 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.