A karaim nyelv és nyelvjárásai

• The aim of  the paper is to demonstrate that the notion “Karaim language” and the status of its dialects exhibit a non-canonical language-dialect scenario. We speak today of a Karaim language which has three dialects: the Northwest dialect of the Lithuanian community (moribund), the Southwest dialect of the Galician community (practically extinct), and the Crimean dialect of the Crimean and Russian communities. The notion “Karaim language” has been established as the language of the Turkic-speaking followers of the Karaite religious confession and has become a significant element of Karaim identity across the communities.The relation between the dialects is characterized by some non-typical dialectal features. The dialects all go back to Kipchak Turkic varieties. Thus they are genealogically relatively closely related, which is a linguistic criteria for making them potential varieties of a language. The ancestor Kipchak varieties from which the dialects developed must have been different and the descendant dialects have maintained the original differences. The original language of the Crimean community is not known. The Turkic variety used by the Crimean Karaims converged with or was replaced by Crimean Tatar. This belongs to another subbranch of the Kipchak branch and is much influenced by Crimean Ottoman, an Oghuz Turkic language.No standard Karaim variety has been established; the communities have been motivated to maintain the dialectal distinctions. Thus no levelling of the dialects has taken place. The dialects are distinct; there is no fuzzy boundary between them. They have not been spoken in a contiguous dialect area, and speakers of different dialects do not easily understand each other’s dialects. Members of different communities communicate with each other in a dominating language of the area, Russian or Polish. The Karaim earlier had a common Hebrew script tradition used in Bible translation, but this was replaced in the twentieth century when the communities created their script systems. Their common religious traditions have promoted the diffusion of certain linguistic mostly lexical features, but this was mostly limited to the religious register. A linguistic description of the Karaim language comprises parallel descriptions of the Lithuanian and the Galician dialects. No unified account of their phonological and morphological systems is feasible. Their syntax share basic features due to their accommodation to the dominating typological characteristics of the area. In this respect these Karaim dialects are similar to other European Turkic languages, e.g. Gagauz.The Karaim case proves that the question what linguistic varieties are dialects of a language cannot be answered by using purely linguistic criteria. What is regarded a language most often depends on political, historical, sociological, and cultural factors. Linguistic features do, of course, play a substantial role in making varieties potential candidates for being dialects of a language. But other factors, as in case of Karaim the shared religious identity, can be decisive.   

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Karaim

dialectology

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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