Krymchak language

Krymchak
кърымчах тыльы
Native to Crimea, Israel, Turkey
Ethnicity 1,800 Krymchaks (2007)[1]
Native speakers
200 (2007)[1]
Official status
Recognised minority
language in
Language codes
ISO 639-3 jct
Glottolog krym1236[3]
Linguasphere part of 44-AAB-a

The Krymchak language (кърымчах тыльы) is a moribund Turkic language spoken in Crimea by the Krymchak people. It is often considered to be a Crimean Tatar dialect. The language is sometimes called Judeo-Crimean Tatar.

Like most Jewish languages, it contains a large number of Hebrew loanwords. Before the Soviet era, it was written using Hebrew characters. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, it was written with the Uniform Turkic Alphabet (a variant of the Latin script), like Crimean Tatar and Karaim. Now it is written in the Cyrillic script.

The community was decimated during the Holocaust. When in May 1944 almost all Crimean Tatars were deported to Soviet Uzbekistan, many speakers of Krymchak were among them, and some remained in Uzbekistan. Nowadays the language is almost extinct. According to the Ukrainian census of 2001, less than 785 Krymchak people remain in Crimea, and just about a hundred people still can speak the language.

Krymchak Turkish English
kılıç kılıç sword
arıslan arslan lion
yaka yaka collar
yulduz yıldız star
yaş yaş age
yol yol road
kalkan kalkan shield
yanhı yeni new
yel yel wind
tülkü tilki fox
sıçan sıçan mouse
i̇mırtha yumurta egg
taş taş stone
altın altın gold
tengiz deniz sea
kumuş gümüş silver
ögüz öküz ox
koy koyun sheep
suv su water
at at horse
agaç ağaç tree
yeşil yeşil green

References

Krymchak language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator
  1. 1 2 Krymchak at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. "To which languages does the Charter apply?". European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Council of Europe. p. 3. Retrieved 2014-04-03.
  3. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Krymchak". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.


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