13 Facts About Karaim language

The Lithuanian dialect of Karaim language is spoken mainly in the town of Trakai by a small community living there since the 14th century.

Karaim language was of the opinion that Israelites from Assyria had gone into the North Caucasus and from there, with the permission of the Assyrian king into the Crimean peninsula.

Karaim language claimed that he has found the tombstone of Yitzhak ha-Sangari and his wife who he claimed were Karaims.

Karaim language has a historically subject–object–verb word order, extensive suffixing agglutination, the presence of vowel harmony, and a lack of gender or noun classes.

Lithuanian Karaim has maintained most of these Turkic features despite its history of more than six hundred years in the environment of the Lithuanian, Russian, and Polish languages.

Related searches

Today, there are Karaim language speakers living in Crimea, Lithuania, Poland, Israel, and the United States.

The Karaim language was spoken in Crimea during the rule of the Ottoman Empire, so there is a significant history of contact with Turkish, a distant relative in the Turkic language family.

Finally, Karaim coexisted with Lithuanian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian as a minority language in the other areas to which it dispersed where Karaims lived and had to speak the dominant majority languages.

Karaim language speakers show a strong tendency towards code-copying.

Children and grandchildren of Karaim language speakers speak Lithuanian, Polish, or Russian, and only the oldest generation still speaks Karaim language.

However, care must be taken in assuming as much, because Karaim has been in contact with the Lipka Tatar language in Lithuania for hundreds of years.

The Karaim language has been protected through translated religious works, such as bibles.

Pritsak 1959, treat the Turkic varieties of the Karaim communities as dialects of one Karaim language and distinguish between a North-Western variety, a South-Western variety, and an Eastern variety.