Ubychian language
| Ubykh | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Caucasus , later Turkey | |
| speaker | none ( language extinct ) | |
| Linguistic classification |
||
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-3 |
uby |
|
The Ubychic language (own name: t ° axə bze ) is a Northwest Caucasian language that became extinct in the 20th century . Originally based in the region around what is now the Russian city of Sochi , the Ubyches emigrated to what is now Turkey in the 19th century . The last fully competent speaker of this language, Tevfik Esenç , died there in 1992.
history
Ubykh was originally spoken on the northeast coast of the Black Sea , most recently near present-day Sochi . Even today some place, river and field names of ubychic origin remind of the former inhabitants of the region. The Ubyks traditionally lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle. As early as the 14th century, Ubychic tribes formed a federation, which from then on took over political and military control over "Ubychia". After successful campaigns against Abkhazia , they moved further south to what is now Sochi. However, the Ubychen have always been a numerically small people - in the mid-19th century there were only between 50,000 and 70,000 members of this ethnic group - so their settlement area was correspondingly small. Their religion was Sunni Islam.
In the Caucasus War , Ubychia joined the Circassians in the fight against Russia, which sought to rule the Caucasus. After the final Russian victory in 1864, they faced the choice of submitting to the Russian tsars or emigrating. How many members of other Muslim Caucasus peoples decided the ubychischen tribal leaders, as Muhadschiren in the Ottoman Empire emigrate. In contrast to the Circassians, Karachayers or Abkhazians , for example , where only parts of the population emigrated, the Ubyches went almost completely into exile. Only a few dozen of them remained, so that their original settlement and language area was completely dissolved. The few Ubyches who remained in their old homeland quickly assimilated and adopted the customs and language of the Adygeans and Russians who lived there . In the Caucasus, Ubychian therefore probably died out in the 19th or early 20th century.
In Turkey the Ubyches founded their own villages, where Ubychic initially lived on. But there, too, an assimilation process and a gradual language change to Turkish began. The language was increasingly no longer passed on to children from parents and the ubychic identity was gradually lost. From the second half of the 20th century, Ubykh was practically only spoken by older people, and by the 1970s at the latest it became clear that the language was on the verge of extinction. With Tevfik Esenç the last liquid spokesman died of Ubychischen in 1,992th
Before its final extinction, however, linguists had managed to extensively document Ubychian in collaboration with the last native speakers. One of the first comprehensive works on Ubychian is Die Päkhy-Sprache by the Hungarian linguist Julius von Mészáros , written in German . From the second half of the 20th century, Georges Dumézil and Hans Kamstrup Vogt made significant contributions to ubychic linguistics .
The Abkhazian writer Bagrat Schinkuba addressed the fate of the Ubychen in his novel In the Sign of the Crescent .
swell
- Helmut Glück (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon Language. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 1993, ISBN 3-476-00937-8 .
literature
- Adolf Dirr : The language of the Ubyches. Asia Major publishing house , Leipzig 1928.
- Georges Dumézil : La langue des oubykhs . Paris 1931.
- Angelika and Ulrich Landmann: Akifiye, Büyükçamurlu. Ubych villages in southeast Turkey. University dissertations in Heidelberg. Esprint-Verlag, Heidelberg 1981, ISBN 3-88326-149-1 and ISBN 3-88326-144-0 . (Ethnography of the Circassians 1 and 2)
