Disappearing languages of Ukraine

Vee Lesyk

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Language & Lingustics

3 min readSep 25, 2020

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Disappearing languages of Ukraine

Nogai language

Number of carriers: unknown.

It belongs to the Nogai-Kipchak subgroup of the north-western (Kipchak) group of Turkic languages.

Crimean Turkish

Number of carriers: unknown.

Spoken languages in a number of villages in the Yalta region along the southern coast of Crimea.

Karaim language

Number of carriers: 6.

The Karaite language has three dialects: Crimean, which almost completely coincides with the middle (orta yolaq) dialect of the Crimean Tatar language, with the exception of Hebrew, Trakai (Lithuanian Karaite dialect), and Galician.

The traditional Karaite script, based on the Hebrew square script, was used until the early twentieth century. Many Karaite families still have manuscript collections of texts written in Hebrew, called majmua. During the twentieth century, Karaite communities also used various modifications of the Latin alphabet (New Turkic Alphabet, Lithuanian and Polish alphabets) and Cyrillic.

Mariupol Greek (Rumei)

Number of carriers: 20,000.

Tauro-Greek language (sometimes classified as a dialect) is a language of the Azov Greeks (Rumei), who were relocated to the Northern Priazovye from the Crimea in 1778.

Urum language

Number of carriers: 40,000.

Modern Urum language is represented among the compact Greek population in 29 villages of Donetsk region, in one village of Zaporizhia region and in the city of Mariupol.

Greeks-Turkophones call themselves Greeks, but their older endoethnonym is the term urum (originated in Asia Minor, becoming widespread in the Crimea). Its origin is associated with the term rum, which was introduced by the Muslim Turks (Seljuks) to denote the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire, who professed Orthodoxy and spoke Greek. The Greeks who spoke the Turkic language acquired the exoethnonym Urumi. Over time, they began to call themselves so. In fact, the names urum and rum are identical terms.

Crimean Tatar language

Number of carriers: 100,000.

Everyone knows about this language… (Deportation of the Crimean Tatars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars, Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Federation)

Plautdietsch language

Number of carriers: 300,000.

The Low Prussian dialect of East Low German with Dutch influence, which developed in the 16th and 17th centuries in the area of the Vistula Delta, Royal Prussia.