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.
