Tsalka language

Tsalka
Tsalka
Musulmandzha, bizim dili
Native to	Georgia, Russia
Ethnicity	Tsalka Greeks
Era	19th century
Language family	Turkic Common Turkic Oghuz Western Oghuz Turkish Eastern Anatolian Tsalka; ; ; ; ; ;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–

Last updated February 05, 2025

Tsalka language is an East-Anatolian dialect of Turkish spoken by Tsalka Greeks ^[a] who mainly inhabit the Tsalka and Tetritsqaro municipalities in Georgia.

Sociolinguistic status

Not all Tsalka Greeks speak Tsalka; there are many Pontic Greek speakers.^[1] Tsalka is exclusively a spoken language and has no writing system.^[2]

The name Tsalka language is not used by its speakers; instead, they use descriptive terms like "bizim dili" ("our language").^[3] Tsalka Greeks also call their language Musulmandzha (the Muslim language) and often identify as Urums as a result of the belief that people's ethnic identity is defined by the genetic relationships of their language; this view was heavily promoted by the Soviet bureaucracy.^[4]^[3] At the same time, they are offended by the claim that they are not real Greeks because of the Turkish influence.^[5] According to Garkavets, Orthodox Mariupol Urums who also speak a Turkish dialect have no similar insecurity in relation to their language.^[6]

Speaking Tsalka is not prestigious and is seen as shameful or a curse, but the speakers believe that switching from Greek to Tsalka has enabled them to preserve their Orthodox Christian faith; they see it in contrast with the conversion of Pontic Greeks into Islam while maintaining their Hellenic language.^[7]^[8] The actual reason for the abandonment of language is unknown, and is not typical for ethnic minorities in Ottoman Empire (see the opposite cases in Bosnia, Herzsegovina, Albania and Greece); it is being theorised that the language shift occurred in the urban population while more rural Pontic Greeks retained a Hellenic dialect.^[9]

Tsalka became less stigmatised after dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 as its partial intelligibility had facilitated trading with Turkey.^[10] The common language also helps Tsalka Greeks to befriend Turkic speakers from neighbouring settlements and provides them with entertainment via Turkish popular media.^[10] Most Tsalka Greeks report a desire to learn the Greek language.^[6]

History

Most ancestors of Tsalka Greeks moved to the East of modern Georgia from the Erzurum Province.^[11] Most Tsalka surnames are formed using a pattern that reflects the history of resettlement: Tsalka speakers add a Turkish suffix (usually -gil) to the name of the male head of the family at the time of migration to the Caucasus.^[12] Other last names have a Russian suffix (-ov or -ev).^[13]

The biggest wave of Pontic Greek migration to Georgia occurred in 1830. Greeks had cooperated with the Russian army that entered Ottoman territories in 1828, and were afraid of Turkish retaliation after the signing of the Treaty of Adrianople, which returned territories with significant Greek population to the Ottoman Empire.^[2] Over 42,000 Greeks living in Akhaltsikhe Municipality, Kars, Bayazet and Erzurum municipalities left the territory of modern Turkey, which constitutes at least 1/5 of the total population of the time.^[2] Tsalka Greeks moved to Georgia in 1830: from Gümüşhane and Maden in May, from Başköy village in Erzurum vilayet in July; the third, biggest group arrived from various sancak of Erzurum vilayet over the course of the second half of the same year.^[14] By the end of 1831, the Greek population of Tsalka settled in 18 villages with a total population of 642 families.^[15] Most of them spoke Pontic Greek at home, but the subsequent generations switched to Turkish as it was the local lingua franca.^[16] This is also reflected in the toponyms: many Greek villages in Tsalka have Greek names, but their residents do not speak Greek.^[17]

In 1979, Tsalka Greeks composed a third of all the Greek population of Georgia.^[18] In later decades, many of them moved to Crimea, Stavropol and Krasnodar Krais.^[19]

Typology and dialects

Typologically, Tsalka language is an Anatolian dialect of Turkish.^[3]

Tsalka has two main dialectal groups: "gro" and "pasena"; both have changed the Turkish morphosyntactic paradigm by replacing the threefold past tense system^[b] with only one form with the "gro" idioms preferring the /-mɨş/ suffix (denoting aorist in standard Tuskish) and "pasena" using the /-di/ suffix (witnessed past in Turkish).^[20] There are reports that claim that the Kars dialects retain the original system of past tenses.^[20]

Phonology

The sound system of the Tsalka language is largely similar to the one of other Eastern Anatolian dialects:

Vowel phonemes^[21]
	Front		Back
	unrounded	rounded	unrounded	rounded
Close	i	y	ɨ	u
Open	e	œ	a	o

There is a tendency of forgoing the Turkish vowel harmony by vowel backness; as a result, the paired Turkish suffixes such as the plural marker -lar/ler have been replaced by a single suffix (-lar) used in all environments.^[21]

The quality of the /i/ vowel has shifted towards /ɨ/ under the influence of the Modern Greek language.^[21]

Modern Greek has other impact on Tsalka too: the latter copied the palatalisation of /k/ and /g/ before front vowels into /t͡ʃ/ and /d͡ʒ/.^[20]

Prosodic features of Tsalka language such as intonation show influence of the Pontic Greek dialect.^[22]

Lexicon

Tsalka language contains a significant amount of Modern Greek loanwords, with a big part of them pertaining to Christianity, such as kilise ("church") from ἐκκλησία, or education (melani, "ink", from μελάνι).^[23] At the same time, many Turkish words exist even in the religious sphere: namaz ("prayer").^[24] Many of the Greek loanwords into Tsalka closely match the same words in the Urum language, the Turkish dialects of Krasnodar Krai Greeks and the Gagauz language; Fatima Yeloeva [ ru ] wrote that this unity arose because they were borrowed from the literary tradition of the Karamanlides, Turkish-speaking Greeks who assimilated into the Greek nation in 20 century.^[25]

Notes

↑ also known as Pontic Urums
↑ simple past, aorist and inferential past

Related Research Articles

Turkish is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and one of two official languages of Cyprus. Significant smaller groups of Turkish speakers also exist in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece, other parts of Europe, the South Caucasus, and some parts of Central Asia, Iraq, and Syria. Turkish is the 18th most spoken language in the world.

Modern Greek, generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek, refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the language sometimes referred to as Standard Modern Greek. The end of the Medieval Greek period and the beginning of Modern Greek is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic features of the modern language arose centuries earlier, having begun around the fourth century AD.

Aorist verb forms usually express perfective aspect and refer to past events, similar to a preterite. Ancient Greek grammar had the aorist form, and the grammars of other Indo-European languages and languages influenced by the Indo-European grammatical tradition, such as Middle Persian, Sanskrit, Armenian, the South Slavic languages, Georgian, Pontic Greek, and Pashto, also have forms referred to as aorist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ottoman Turkish</span> Standardized register of Turkish in the Ottoman Empire

Ottoman Turkish was the standardized register of the Turkish language in the Ottoman Empire. It borrowed extensively, in all aspects, from Arabic and Persian. It was written in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet. Ottoman Turkish was largely unintelligible to the less-educated lower-class and to rural Turks, who continued to use kaba Türkçe, which used far fewer foreign loanwords and is the basis of the modern standard. The Tanzimât era (1839–1876) saw the application of the term "Ottoman" when referring to the language ; Modern Turkish uses the same terms when referring to the language of that era. More generically, the Turkish language was called تركچه Türkçe or تركی Türkî "Turkish".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pontic Greek</span> Variety of modern Greek

Pontic Greek is a variety of Modern Greek indigenous to the Pontus region on the southern shores of the Black Sea, northeastern Anatolia, and the Eastern Turkish and Caucasus region. An endangered Greek language variety, Pontic Greek is spoken by about 778,000 people worldwide, who are known as Pontic or Pontian Greeks.

Urum is a Turkic language spoken by several thousand ethnic Greeks who inhabit a few villages in southeastern Ukraine. Over the past few generations, there has been a deviation from teaching children Urum to the more common languages of the region, leaving a fairly limited number of new speakers. The Urum language is often considered a variant of Crimean Tatar.

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The Pontic Greeks, also Pontian Greeks or simply Pontians, are an ethnically Greek group indigenous to the region of Pontus, in northeastern Anatolia. They share a common Pontic Greek culture that is distinguished by its music, dances, cuisine, and clothing. Folk dances, such as the Serra, and traditional musical instruments, like the Pontic lyra, remain important to Pontian diaspora communities. Pontians traditionally speak Pontic Greek, a modern Greek variety, that has developed remotely in the region of Pontus. Commonly known as Pontiaka, it is traditionally called Romeika by its native speakers.

Tsalka is a town and municipality center in southern Georgia's Kvemo Kartli region.

The peoples of the Caucasus, or Caucasians, are a diverse group comprising more than 50 ethnic groups throughout the Caucasus.

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The Urums are several groups of Turkic-speaking Greek Orthodox people native to Crimea. The emergence and development of the Urum identity took place from 13th to the 17th centuries. Bringing together the Crimean Greeks along with Greek-speaking Crimean Goths, with other indigenous groups that had long inhabited the region, resulting in a gradual transformation of their collective identity.

The official language of Greece is Greek, spoken by 99% of the population. In addition, a number of non-official, minority languages and some Greek dialects are spoken as well. The most common foreign languages learned by Greeks are English, German, French and Italian.

The Greeks in Georgia, which in academic circles is often considered part of the broader, historic community of Pontic Greeks or—more specifically in this region—Caucasus Greeks, is estimated at between 15,000 and 20,000 people to 100,000 down from about 100,000 in 1989. The community has dwindled due to the large wave of repatriation to Greece as well as emigration to Russia, and in particular Stavropol Krai in the North Caucasus region of southern Russia. The community has established the Union of Greeks in Georgia and there is a Cultural Centre and a newspaper entitled Greek Diaspora.

Greeks have been present in what is now southern Russia from the 6th century BC; those settlers assimilated into the indigenous populations. The vast majority of contemporary Russia's Greek minority populations are descendants of Medieval Greek refugees, traders, and immigrants from the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Balkans, and Pontic Greeks from the Empire of Trebizond and Eastern Anatolia who settled mainly in southern Russia and the South Caucasus in several waves between the mid-15th century and the second Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29. As during the Genocide of the Pontic Greeks, the survivors fled to the Upper Pontus.

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The Caucasus Greeks, also known as the Greeks of Transcaucasia and Russian Asia Minor, are the ethnic Greeks of the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia in what is now southwestern Russia, Georgia, and northeastern Turkey. These specifically include the Pontic Greeks, though they today span a much wider region including the Russian north Caucasus, and the former Russian Caucasus provinces of the Batum Oblast' and the Kars Oblast', now in north-eastern Turkey and Adjara in Georgia.

Mariupol Greek ), also known as Crimean Greek and Tauro-Romaic, is a Greek variety spoken by the ethnic Greeks living along the northern coast of the Sea of Azov, in southeastern Ukraine; the community itself is referred to as Azov Greeks.

Sameba is a predominantly Greek village in Tsalka Municipality, Georgia.

References

Bibliography

Елоева, Фатима (2002). Проблемы языков дисперсных групп. Тюркоязычные православные греки Цалкинского и Тетрицкаровского районов Грузии.
Popov, Anton (2016). Culture, ethnicity and migration after communism: the Pontic Greeks. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-4724-3843-0.
Sideri, Eleni (2017). "Historical Diasporas, Religion and Identity: Exploring the Case of the Greeks of Tsalka". In Sideri, Eleni; Roupakia, Lydia Efthymia (eds.). Religions and migrations in the Black Sea region. Religion and global migrations. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-319-39067-3.

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[1] so known as Pontic Urums

[21] simple past, aorist and inferential past

[FOOTNOTESideri201739-40-2] Sideri 2017, p. 39-40.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева200210-3] 1 2 3 Елоева 2002, p. 10.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева20025-4] 1 2 3 Елоева 2002, p. 5.

[FOOTNOTEPopov2016154,_157-5] Popov 2016, p. 154, 157.

[FOOTNOTEPopov2016155-6] Popov 2016, p. 155.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева20026-7] 1 2 Елоева 2002, p. 6.

[FOOTNOTEPopov2016157-8] Popov 2016, p. 157.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева20028-10-9] Елоева 2002, p. 8-10.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева20028-9-10] Елоева 2002, p. 8-9.

[FOOTNOTEPopov2016158-11] 1 2 Popov 2016, p. 158.

[FOOTNOTEPopov201653-54-12] Popov 2016, p. 53-54.

[FOOTNOTEPopov2016111-13] Popov 2016, p. 111.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева200216-14] Елоева 2002, p. 16.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева200211-15] Елоева 2002, p. 11.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева200212-16] Елоева 2002, p. 12.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева200214-17] Елоева 2002, p. 14.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева200215-18] Елоева 2002, p. 15.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева20027-19] Елоева 2002, p. 7.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева20028-20] Елоева 2002, p. 8.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева200225-22] 1 2 3 Елоева 2002, p. 25.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева200224-23] 1 2 3 Елоева 2002, p. 24.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева200223-24] Елоева 2002, p. 23.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева20026,_27-25] Елоева 2002, p. 6, 27.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева200227-26] Елоева 2002, p. 27.

[FOOTNOTEЕлоева200227-33-27] Елоева 2002, p. 27-33.

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Tsalka
Musulmandzha, bizim dili
Native to	Georgia, Russia
Ethnicity	Tsalka Greeks
Era	19th century
Language family	Turkic Common Turkic Oghuz Western Oghuz Turkish Eastern Anatolian Tsalka
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–