Karaim language

Karaim Къарай тил
Spoken in	Lithuania Ukraine Poland
speaker	81 speakers (2014)
Linguistic classification	Altaic languages (controversial) Turkic languages Kipchak languages Karaim
Official status
Official language in	-
Language codes
ISO 639 -1	-
ISO 639 -2	tut (other Altaic languages)
ISO 639-3	kdr

The Karaim language ( Karaim Къарай тил Qaraj til ), or Karaim for short , is a Turkic language . It is spoken by the ethnic-religious group of the Karaites , who split off from Judaism in the 8th century and still have some followers in the Baltic States , Eastern Europe , Turkey and Israel . The ISO3 language abbreviation is kdr.

Alternative names

The Karaim language is also known by other names. This is also how “Karay tili” and the Hebrew name are used לשון קדר Laschon Kedar used "language of the Karaites". In Turkish Turkology , the term “ Karay Türkçesi ” is used.

Main distribution area

Karaim was spoken in the 20th century in small linguistic islands in Trakai and Panevėžys (Lithuania) (north-western dialect) and in the areas of Lutsk and Halych ( western Ukraine ) (south-western dialect) and in the Crimea (southern dialect). Smaller minorities can also be found in Turkey and Israel . Today, Karaim is only cultivated to a certain extent in Trakai. As a contribution to its preservation, a CD was published in 2003, which introduces the language and culture. In contrast, the dialect of Halytsch is almost extinct.

Of the 2602 Karaites, in the last census of the USSR in 1989, only 503 gave Karaim as their mother tongue, while 52 mentioned it as a second language.

Classification

The Karaim language, along with Crimean Tatar, Kumyk and Karachay-Balkar, belongs to the Kipchak-Oghuz or West Kipchak group, which belongs to the Kipchak or northwestern branch of the Turkic languages ​​(see "Fischer Lexikon Sprachen" (1987) and "Metzler Lexikon Sprache" (1993) ) and the article Turkic languages ).

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Karaim has been an important literary language since the Middle Ages , written predominantly in Hebrew letters . In the first half of the 20th century there was a phase when non-religious texts were also published in Karaim. The magazine karaim aivazy (?) Was published in Warsaw .

During the Soviet era, Karaim was written using the Cyrillic script, as was the case in a grammar published in Russian in 1964. After the independence of Lithuania , the Latin script was used in Trakai, whereby the orthography is partly based on the Lithuanian. A spelling based on Turkish can be found in a short description of the Trakai dialect in English, which was published in 2006.

Latin alphabet

A a	B ʙ	C c	Ç ç	D d	E e	F f	G g
H h	I i	J j	Q q	Ƣ ƣ	L l	M m	N n
Ꞑ ꞑ	O o	Ɵ ɵ	P p	S s	Ş ş	Ь ь	K k
U u	V v	Y y	R r	T t	X x	Z z	Ƶ ƶ

Cyrillic alphabet

А а	Б б	В в	Г г	Гъ гъ	Д д	Дж дж	Е е
Ж ж	З з	И и	Й й	К к	Къ къ	Л л	М м
Н н	Нъ нъ	О о	Ӧ ӧ	П п	Р р	С с	Т т
У у	Ӱ ӱ	Ф ф	Х х	Хъ хъ	Ц ц	Ч ч	Ш ш
Ъ ъ	Ы ы	Ь ь	Э э	Ю ю	Я я

Web links

Test Wikipedia in Karaim

• W. Schulze: Karaim . (PDF; 179 kB) In: M. Okuka (Hrsg.): Lexicon of the Languages ​​of the European East (= Wieser Encyclopedia of the European East 10). Klagenfurt 2002, p. 787.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Karaim at Ethnologue
2. ↑ W. Schulze: Karaimisch . (PDF; 179 kB) In: M. Okuka (Hrsg.): Lexicon of the Languages ​​of the European East (= Wieser Encyclopedia of the European East 10). Klagenfurt 2002, p. 787.
3. ↑ Éva Ágnes Csató, David Nathan: Spoken Karaim . Tokyo University of Foreign Studies / SOAS, University of London 2003; see. David Nathan: The Spoken Karaim CD: Sound, Text, Lexicon and “Active Morphology” for Language Learning Multimedia (PDF)
4. ^ Heinz F. Wendt: Fischer Lexikon Sprachen , 1987, pp. 328–329.
5. ↑ Helmut Glück (Ed.): Metzler Lexikon Sprach , 1993, p. 657.
6. ↑ KM Musaev: Grammatika karaimskogo jazyka . Nauka, Moscow 1964
7. ↑ Éva Ágnes Csató: Lithuanian Karaim . In: Journal of Endagered Languages , vol. 1 (2012), pp. 33–45, here 33 f. ( tehlikedekidiller.com ).
8. ↑ Timur Kocaoğlu: Karay: The Trakai Dialect . LINCOM Europe, Munich 2006.