Udinen

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The Udi people (also: Uden) are from the north-west Azerbaijan native ethnic group of about 10,000 members who live next to it in some other former Soviet Union. Their language, Udish , belongs to the Lesgic language group of the Northeast Caucasian languages . Udish is the last remaining remnant of the older Aghwan language , which was the written language (but not the only spoken regional language) in a special alphabet in the late antique-early medieval kingdom of Albania and at the same time the church language of the Albanian Orthodox Church, which was independent until the early Middle Ages. The majority of the inhabitants of the region, who had converted to Islam, had almost all converted to the Azerbaijani language since the Middle Ages, and the Christians joined partly the Georgian Orthodox , partly the Armenian Church (until the 19th century an Albanian Catholic within the church), whereupon Most Christians, especially in the west (Georgian region of Heretia ) converted to the Georgian language , in the south to the Armenian language. The other Udish-speaking Udines are today almost all Christians, some of the Georgian and some of the Armenian Church; only a few Muslims still have some knowledge of Udish.

Their population, which was estimated at 7,200 people around 1906, was only 2,761 people after the 1926 census. Current sources estimate numbers up to 10,000 Udinen. The Udines of Muslim faith have mostly been absorbed by the Azerbaijanis , while the Christian Udines living in Georgia have been largely absorbed by the Georgians .

Photo of a Udin woman from Wartaschen, 1883

Settlement area

The Uden live today or lived in four places until the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict : the speakers of the Nij dialect still live in the village of Nic near Qəbələ and in the neighboring village of Mirzabeyli; the speakers of the Wartaschen dialect - until the expulsion in 1988 - in the small town of Wartaschen, today Oğuz , all on the territory of the Azerbaijan Republic . Other speakers live in the village of Sinobiani (Georgian ზინობიანი, English translation Zinobiani), which until a few years ago had the Soviet name "Oktomberi", in the municipality of Qvareli in eastern Georgia ( Kakheti ), whose inhabitants lived in the years 1920-22 Wartaschen have moved. Other Uden found their way to Russia, Armenia and Georgia as a result of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. If the Uden are still proficient in Udish today, they are often trilingual: Russian, Azerbaijani , Georgian or Armenian , and Udish .

history

The Uden were Christianized very early, around 400 AD. In the ancient kingdom of Albania , a separate Orthodox church with its own church language , the Alvanic language, with its own script, which was an early form of the Udic language, was formed. After the wars against the Sassanid Empire , however, their influence was limited to the western areas of what is now Azerbaijan. Although Alvanic played an important role in Albania as an ancient and early medieval official and church language and the only established written language, it was originally only one of many tribal languages ​​spoken in the empire, which was spoken mainly in northwestern Albania, but its importance increased. The name of the Udic language and the Udinen goes back to the historical core region Uti (Armenian Utik , Greek Otene ) around the second capital of Albania, Barda .

During the Arab rule, many Uden converted to Islam. Albania was largely Islamized as the Muslim empire of Aran . In the Caucasus, the "Albanian" Church, to which the Christian Uden belonged, disintegrated and became part of the Armenian Church (former Catholic in Gandsassar ), and partly of the Georgian Orthodox Church (especially in the Heretia region , which fell to Georgia in the Middle Ages and linguistically was Georgized) united. That is why the speakers of the Udish language today are partly Armenian Christians, partly Georgian Orthodox Christians and only a few Muslims. In the last few years there have been efforts in Azerbaijan to unite the few Uudin Christian communities in a again independent "Albanian Church". The Alvanian church language fell out of use in the early Middle Ages and the spoken udic language was increasingly replaced by the Azerbaijani, Armenian and Georgian languages, depending on the region, and was only preserved in a few smaller regions around the first capital of Albania, Qəbələ.

A large part of the Armenian-Christian Udines in Warta were expelled from Azerbaijan during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict , like the Armenians , and so ended up in northeastern Armenia or in even larger numbers in Russia . In Wartaschen, which has now been renamed Oğuz, only about 6 to 8 Udish-speaking families or 50 Udine families remained in addition to the newly settled Azerbaijanis. The 2010 Russian Census found 4267 Udines in Russia, the largest group in Rostov Oblast . The 2009 census in Azerbaijan identified around 3800 Udines in Azerbaijan. As mentioned, there are also some in Armenia and Georgia.

Web links

Commons : Udi people  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

literature

  • Udinen . In: Brockhaus. Small conversation lexicon from 1906 , p. 77722
  • Gerhard Deeters: Linguistics in the Soviet Union . In: Bolshevik Science and 'Cultural Policy' . Ost-Europa-Verlag, Königsberg, Berlin 1938, pp. 236-251, pp. 238-239.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Map at lingvarium.org , dialects marked as 10aa and 10ab, former language areas as 10.
  2. ↑ Map at lingvarium.org , still marked as 10aa in the west under the name Oktomberi.
  3. ^ Article "Albania" in the Encyclopædia Iranica (third paragraph).
  4. ↑ Historical area of ​​distribution of the Alwan and Udic languages ​​as mother tongue or second language in the 4th – 8th centuries. Century, 10–13. Century (medium green) and remaining areas of the Udischen around 1800 (dark green).
  5. ↑ Manana Tandaschwili : Das Udische - Geschichte der Uden. Tbilisi / Frankfurt a. M., 2006.
  6. ^ Wolfgang Schulze: Towards a History of Udi. International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics 1, 2005, pp. 55-91.
  7. ^ Results of the census in Russia , fifth Excel table there, line 167 (Russian).
  8. ↑ State Statistical Committee of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Ethnic Composition of the Population in the 1926-2009 Censuses (English) ( Memento of the original from January 3, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ( MS Excel ; 39 kB). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.azstat.org