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. 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 prothetic. Turkic languages originally did not have 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.

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.

Phonology

Vowels

Examples

Consonants

/θ, ð/ appear solely in loanwords from Greek. /t͡s/ appears in loanwords. [w] 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. In 2000, Alexander Garkavets uses the following alphabet: In an Urum primer issued in Kyiv 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.