Urum language

Urum is a Turkic language spoken by several thousand people of Greek descent who inhabit a few villages in the Southeastern Ukraine and in Georgia. The language evolved in the Crimean peninsula, where there had been a Greek minority among the Crimean Tatars. In 1778 the majority of Crimean Greeks left the then Muslim Crimean Khanate and settled within the borders of the Russian Empire.

The name Urum is derived from the medieval Greek word for Rome designating Constantinople and Greece in general. The Ottoman empire used it to describe non-Muslims within the empire. The initial vowel in Urum is prosthetic: originally Turkic languages did not have r- in word-initial position, and in borrowed words used to add a vowel before it.

A few manuscripts are known to be written in Urum using Greek characters (see #References). During the period between 1927 and 1937,the Urum language was written in reformed Latin characters, the so called 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.

Very little has been published on the Urum language. There exists a very small lexicon (Baruch Podolsky, A Greek Tatar - English Glossary, Harrassowitz 1985 ISBN 3447002999), and a small description of the language (Baruch Podolsky, Notes on the Urum Language, Mediterranean Language Review vol. 2, 1986, pp. 99-112).