ნასესხობათა ინტეგრაცია წალკურ ურუმულში

Abstract

Many ethnic groups live on the territory of Georgia and among them are Greeks. The history of migration of the Greeks started two centuries ago according to the Andriapolis Peace treaty, which was signed between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. There were two groups of Greeks – Pontic and Turkish-speaking Greeks. Turkish-speaking Greeks settled in the southern part of Georgia, in particular in the Tsalka region. The language they speak is one of the dialects of the Turkish language and it is called as Urum language. Urum is a very interesting socio-linguistic phenomenon. Having lived for a long time in Soviet Georgia, the Russian language had a strong influence on Urum and this is not surprising, since the Greeks were educated in Russian schools and during the Soviet era, Russian was, in fact, the state language. The paper presents an analysis of how lexical units borrowed from Russian are integrated into Urum. The study based on the corpus data of Turkish-speaking Greeks revealed the main strategy of assimilation of foreign lexical units: In general, borrowings obey the grammar norms of the Urum language, which facilitates the process of integration of nouns and verbs. Nowadays Urum language includes several linguistic lexical layers and therefore it can be considered as a “mixed” language. During the Soviet period, Russian clichés became stronger in the speech of the Urums. Although, there are some examples when Urum people use in their conversation whole phrases or even sentences from Russian without any adaptation. A small number of Georgian, Azerbaijani and Greek lexical units were observed as well.