Urum language

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.

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 cited 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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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 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]

Classification

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]

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^[7]
• 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.^[7][8]

Writing system

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]

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	Θ θ

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

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,^[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]