Doğu Karadeniz’de Konuşulan Diller ve Türkçe İle Etkileşimleri
Interactions of the Languages Spoken in the Eastren Black Sea Region with Turkish

Summary/Abstract: The Hemshin language, spoken in the eastern parts of the Black Sea region, is a branch of Greek and Armenian, and the two other languages of the region, Georgian and Lazi, belong to the Caucasian group. Greek spoken in some villages of Trabzon seems to loose it’s all speakers in a close future. Vocabulary of the local Greek dialect shows that mainly Turkish and also Lazi and Persian have influences on it. Almost half of the words in the spoken language are Turkish. Number of those learning the Lazi language as a mother language also sharply decreases and is in the process of disappearing. Spreading of communication and information technologies to the remotest villages diminished space of using local languages, and the Lazi also faces to that process. The Hemshinians living in Rize speak in a Turkish consisting of Armenian words, and those living in Artvin use the Homshetma dialect of Armenian. The Hopa Hemshinians regard themselves as Turks. They newly discovered that their language is Armenian. Some of them reject this fact, but in linguistic terms it is Armenian. The Rize Hemshinians either have forgotten this language or never used. Georgians in Turkey have been under Ottoman-Turk administration for more than four centuries, but they have better preserved their language than the Georgians in other countries. This fact may be related to their habitation in rural regions. Georgian and other languages spoken in the region constantly withdraw before Turkish.

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