Series | Eurasian Studies
Edited book | Crimea between Russia, Italy and the Ottoman Empire
Chapter | Le lingue turciche della Crimea fra migrazioni e estinzione
Le lingue turciche della Crimea fra migrazioni e estinzione
Abstract
The contribution gives a typological overview over the Turkic languages spoken in Crimea, both in the past and the present, and focuses then on the sociolinguistic background and development of the several languages. Most of the Crimean Turkic languages belong to the West Qipchaq group, namely Crimean Tatar, Krymchak, Crimean Karaim, Urum, and Armeno-Qipchaq; to these languages the so-called Crimean Ottoman or Crimean Turkish, with mainly Oghuz characteristics, as well as Crimean Nogay, belonging to the Eastern group, can be added. Some of these languages are extinct (Armeno-Qipchaq, Crimean Ottoman), others are spoken by a very small number of speakers outside of Crimea due to migration (Karaim, Krymchak, Urum), and all of these languages are considered to be severely endangered. The main Turkic language of the peninsula, Crimean Tatar, shared the troubled history of language and writing policies with the other Turkic languages of the former Soviet Union, but experienced a traumatic rupture in 1944-45 due to the Stalinist deportations to Central Asia. Today the sociolinguistic situation of Crimean Tatar, characterized by widespread bilingualism (mainly with Russian, Ukrainian, Uzbek, and Turkish) is precarious.
Submitted: March 29, 2017 | Accepted: July 4, 2017 | Published Dec. 12, 2017 | Language: it
Keywords Qipchaq Turkic languages • Crimean Tatar • Language policy
Copyright © 2017 Matthias Kappler. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/6969-201-7/EUR-8-2
