Crimean Tatars in Bulgaria - Language

Language

Crimean Tatar is a Kipchak language from the Western Turkic language group which, however, has been strongly influenced by Oguz through Ottoman Turkish. The Tatars in Bulgaria speak various local dialects developed in a foreign linguistic environment. This process is very complicated and has continued to the present day, On the one hand, the idiolects of speakers of the main dialects are modifying and tending to become standardized, with a particular dialect prevailing in a particular population centre but strongly influenced by other dialects (Boev, 1971, p. 81).

Along with the standardization of the Kipchak dialects of refugees, there was a process of Oghuzation too. This process can be traced back to the pre-emmgration Oghuz tradition in the literary Crimean Tatar language (Boev, 1971, p. 94). After the Tatars settled in the Bulgarian lands, the influence of Ottoman Turkish on the vernacular intensified. The Tatar language was at a sadvantage the official language was Ottoman Turkish, and did not develop a literary variant (Boev, 1964, pp. 81–2).

After the Liberation, the process intensified to the point of linguistic assimilation, mainly because Tatars and Turks communicated in Turkish and, later, because most children were sent to Turkish rather than Tatar schools (Boev, 1964, p. 2 Boev, 1971, p. 109). In 1910, 546 Tatars from Southern Dobruja cited Turkish as their native language.

The choice of Turkish in the past few years has also been largely determined by the fact that the Tatars do not have access to Crimean Tatar literature and read the available Turkish books. The boom of Turkish satellite television has also affected the Tatar language. For a considerable section of the Tatar community. Tatar remains a means of communication among elderly people only. Children understand but do not speak the language.

The Tatars started learning Bulgarian even before the Liberation (Kanitz, 1932. p. 141). When Southern Dobruja was under Romanian rule, the Tatars went to Romanian schools and, according to Bulgarian sources, learnt Romanian very quickly. Bulgarian was spoken by the males in their social contacts and at work. Today, even the most elderly Tatar women understand Bulgarian. The Tatars in contemporary Bulgaria are trilingual, but there is a strong tendency towards the replacement of Tatar by Turkish.

The Tatars regard the Tatar language as a distinctive feature of their collective identity and ethnic differentiation from the others: "We don’t speak either pure Turkish or Bulgarian - we are Tatars". The main marker of Tatarlik " Tatar ethnicity " is the Tatar language. This is also illustrated by a Tatar proverb.

A Tatar who does not speak Tatar with Tatars is not worthy of his mother’s milk (7).

The Tatars qualify the loss of the Tatar language as a loss of ethnicity: "Where the Tatars were a minority they have been assimilated. The Young no longer speak Tatar, yet in the past some Turkish women who married Tatars would eventually forget Turkish"; "The Tatars have now mixed The language is also mixed"; "We have mixed. We speak almost Turkish . Few Tatars have remained".

Informants say that intermarriage leads to ethnic assimilation because that is thc easiest way to lose the Tatar language. Still, there are people of Tatar origins who neither speak nor understand Tatar, yet have the self-awareness of "true Tatars" - probably in combination with a prioritized Turkish self-awareness. There is an interesting form of maintaining the lexical stock of Tatar dialects and of demonstrating Tatar ethnicity: when they meet, Tatars from different population centres will "test" each other on typical Tatar words. Bulgarians or Turks who speak Tatar also test the Tatars and declare themselves truer Tatars if the latter fail to give the right answer. This indicates that non-Tatars also regard language as an important ethnic marker of the Tatar community.