The Urum Alphabet

Urum is a Turkic language ^[1] spoken by ethnic Greeks in Georgia (primarily in Kvemo Kartli / Tsalka region) and Ukraine (Donetsk region). Urum speakers number approximately 190,000–220,000, though many are elderly. They are part of the broader Pontic Greek diaspora whose ancestors inhabited the Black Sea coast before the 20th-century population exchanges.

The Urum-speaking communities are Greek Orthodox Christians who have maintained a distinct cultural identity for centuries, even as they shifted to Turkic speech during the Ottoman period. UNESCO classifies Urum as seriously endangered, as younger generations increasingly use Russian, Georgian, or Greek rather than Urum.

The ancestors of today's Urum speakers lived in Pontus and Cappadocia (modern Turkey) ^[2], where they were surrounded by Turkic-speaking populations for centuries after the Seljuk and Ottoman conquests of Anatolia (11th–15th centuries). During this extended period of Ottoman rule, Greek-speaking communities in inland Anatolia gradually shifted to Turkic speech while maintaining Greek Orthodox Christianity and Greek cultural identity.

These communities later migrated to Georgia and Ukraine — then parts of the Russian Empire — primarily in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The name "Urum" itself comes from the Turkic word for "Roman/Byzantine" (Rum/Rûm), the traditional Turkic designation for Greeks of the Byzantine tradition. So the Urum people are, in the Turkic worldview, the "Byzantine Greeks" — they maintained their Greek identity despite adopting the Turkic language of their Ottoman neighbours.

Yes — Urum belongs to the Oghuz branch of Turkic ^[1], making it closely related to Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Turkmen. The Urum counting words are almost identical to Turkish (bir, iki, üç, dört, beş, altı, yedi, sekiz, dokuz), and the basic grammar (agglutination, vowel harmony, verb-final order) mirrors Turkish closely.

The ancestral shift to Turkic speech occurred in an Ottoman Turkish context, which is why Urum's Turkic core is Oghuz Turkic specifically. However, Urum has been separated from mainstream Turkish for several centuries and has absorbed significant Greek vocabulary as well as Russian and Georgian loanwords from the communities' later environments in the Caucasus and Ukraine.

Urum uses a Cyrillic alphabet of 28 letters ^[2], developed for the language during the Soviet period. It includes 8 vowels and 20 consonants, with 3 unique letters not found in standard Russian Cyrillic: Ö (front rounded vowel /ø/), Ü (front rounded vowel /y/), and Ң (velar nasal /ŋ/).

These unique letters represent the Turkic vowel harmony and nasal consonant phonemes that standard Russian Cyrillic cannot express. Historically, Urum had no standardised writing system — the Cyrillic script was developed primarily for linguistic documentation rather than everyday community use. Most Urum speakers today use Russian or Georgian for writing.

Yes — UNESCO classifies Urum as seriously endangered ^[1]. Estimates of speakers range from 190,000 to 220,000, but the majority are elderly. In both Georgia and Ukraine, younger generations of the Urum community have largely shifted to Russian, with Greek as a prestige language for cultural identity.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine (Donetsk region) has additionally displaced many Urum-speaking communities, further disrupting intergenerational transmission. There are limited formal educational resources in Urum, and no widely used standardised written form. Linguistic documentation efforts by researchers have become increasingly urgent to preserve this unique Greek-Turkic linguistic heritage.

Urum belongs to the Oghuz branch of the Turkic language family ^[2] — the same branch as Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Turkmen. All Turkic languages share agglutinative morphology, vowel harmony, and SOV (subject-object-verb) word order. Urum speakers adopted Oghuz Turkic specifically because they lived under Ottoman Turkish rule for centuries.

Despite its Turkic grammar and core vocabulary, Urum carries extensive Greek, Russian, and Georgian loanwords that reflect centuries of contact with surrounding communities. This makes Urum a rare example of a language that is ethnically Greek, grammatically Turkic, and lexically mixed — a direct product of the extraordinary historical experience of Pontic Greek communities under Ottoman rule.

The main Urum-speaking communities are found in Georgia (primarily Kvemo Kartli region, centred on the town of Tsalka) and Ukraine (Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions) ^[1]. These communities are part of the broader Pontic Greek diaspora that settled in the Russian Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Smaller Urum communities exist in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan — particularly descendants of those deported from Crimea and the Caucasus under Stalin. In the broader Greek diaspora, Urum speakers are sometimes called Urumli or Turkophone Greeks. Many identify strongly as Greek by ethnicity and religion while speaking Turkic as their mother tongue.

No — Urum and Pontic Greek are distinct languages ^[2]. Pontic Greek is a Greek dialect (Indo-European), spoken by Greeks of the Black Sea coast who retained their Greek speech through the Ottoman period. Urum is a Turkic language spoken by Greeks who shifted to Turkic speech during the same period in inland Anatolia.

Both groups share Greek Orthodox Christianity and ethnic Greek identity, but their languages are fundamentally different in structure, vocabulary, and script. The distinction illustrates how language shift can occur without loss of ethnic or religious identity — the Urum people remained Greek in culture while adopting the language of their Ottoman neighbours.