List of Revived Languages - Lazuri, Aka Laz

Lazuri, Aka Laz

The UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (2010) declares Lazuri as a language that is definitively endangered. Lazuri is a Southwest Caucasian language spoken by ca 30,000 people as their mother tongue along the East Black Sea coast of Turkey and in some parts of the Autonomous Republic of Adjara (Salminen, 2007). The region where the Lazi people live is called Lazona (Benninghaus, 1989). Because Lazuri is primarily an oral language, and all new speakers tend to grow up bilingual (typically speaking Lazuri and Turkish), the language is at risk of extinction (e.g., Yuksel-Sokmen & Chasin, 2008). Although the Lazuri alphabet was first established around the late 20s by a native folklorist, named Iskender Tsitasi, who published periodicals and poems until 1938, there were many obstacles to learn and to teach Lazuri due to the lack of language learning resources and limited documentation of the language (interview with language activist İsmail Avcı Bucaklişi in Istanbul, April 2012). Hence, Lazuri remained a primary spoken language until Lazoglu and Feuerstein re-introduced the Lazuri Alboni or Alphabet in Latin letters in 1984 and started to publish periodicals, called 'Ogni' (“Did you hear”). The first Lazuri Dictionary (Bucaklişi & Uzunhasanoğlu, 2006) was among the first one to adopt the Lazuri Alboni. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery become the first book which has been formally translated into the Lazuri Alboni by Sinan Albayrakoğlu (2011) who worked four years on the Turkish to Lazuri translation. Also, in 2011 the Bosphorus University of Istanbul started to offer Lazuri as an elective class for beginners. With the recent establishment of the Lazika Yayin Kolektif (Lazika Publication Collective) in 2010, current and future generations of students, teachers, authors, and scholars of Lazuri are encouraged to contribute to the process of language revitalization, thus paving the way for a Lazuri Literature.