Karamanli Turkish

Karamanlı Turkish
Karamanlıca - Karamanlı Türkçesi
Native toGreece, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Romania, Turkey
Era19th century
Turkic
Greek
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Glottologkara1469
An inscription in Karamanlı Turkish on the entrance of the former Greek Orthodox church of Agia Eleni in Sille, near Konya.
Karamanlidika inscription found on the door of a house in İncesu, Turkey
An inscription in Karamanli Turkish found on a tombstone in Elmalık, Yalova Province; it says ΤΕΚΕ ΟΓΛΟΥ ΧΑΤΖΙ ΓΙΑΝΙ ΓΙΠΤΙΡΑΝ 1910 'commissioned by Tekeoglou (or son of Teke) Hatzi Yani in 1910'.

Karamanli Turkish (Turkish: Karamanlı Türkçesi; Greek: Καραμανλήδικα, romanizedKaramanlídika) is an extinct dialect of the Turkish language spoken by the Karamanlides. Although the official Ottoman Turkish was written in the Arabic script, the Karamanlides used the Greek alphabet to write their form of Turkish. Karamanlı Turkish had its own literary tradition and produced numerous published works in print during the 19th century, some of them published by the British and Foreign Bible Society as well as by Evangelinos Misailidis in the Anatoli or Misailidis publishing house.[1][2]

Karamanlı writers and speakers were expelled from Turkey as part of the Greek-Turkish population exchange in 1923. Some speakers preserved their language in the diaspora. The written form stopped being used immediately after Turkey adopted the Latin alphabet.

A fragment of a manuscript written in Karamanlı was also found in the Cairo Geniza.[3]

  1. ^ Misailidis 1986, p. 134
  2. ^ Coumounduros, Mark (2021). "Karamanlides". In Speake, Graham (ed.). Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition. Routledge. p. 881. ISBN 978-1-135-94206-9.
  3. ^ Julia Krivoruchko Karamanli – a new language variety in the Genizah: T-S AS 215.255 http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Taylor-Schechter/fotm/july-2012/index.html Archived 2016-10-27 at the Wayback Machine