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216 Book Reviews Turkish World from Inside and Outside

Christiane Bulut (ed.), Linguistic Minorities in and Turkic-speaking Minorities of the Periphery. (Turcologica 111.) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018. 482 pp. ISBN 978-3-447-10723-5, ISSN 0177-4743.

The Republic of Turkey is known as an ethnically, culturally and linguisti- cally diverse country, which is largely related to its geographical position on the Anatolian peninsula—one of the oldest permanently settled regions of the world. This area has seen several civilizations, as well as shifts of cul- tures and , which is still reflected in its modern diversity. During the rule of the , which lasted for six centuries, Turkey con- trolled most of southeastern , parts of central and , the , and northern Africa. Many of these areas still preserve traces of Turkish influence, not the least in the realms of religion and . Currently, Turkish (Türkiye türkçesi) is the only official language of Turkey, but besides it a few dozen other languages, each with a different history and status, are spoken in the country. lists 40 languages belonging to the Turkic, Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian, and Abkhaz-Adyghe families, including the nearly extinct Hértevin (Afro-Asiatic) and two extinct languages: Ubykh (Abkhaz-Adyghe) and Syriac (Afro-Asiatic). UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (Moseley 2010) adds to the list of extinct languages also Cappadocian Greek (a mixed Greek-Turkish variety) and Mlahso (Afro-Asiatic). Ladino (Indo-European, Judaeo-Spanish) and Turoyo (Afro-Asiatic) are defined as severely endangered, whereas Western Armenian (Indo-European), its variant Homshetsma, Pontic Greek (Indo-European), and Laz (Kartvelian), are considered as definitely endangered. Zaza (Indo- European) is seen as vulnerable. Outside Turkey, Turkic languages are spoken to varying degrees in for- mer outposts of the Ottoman Empire, where different historical versions of (Osmanlı türkçesi) used to have the status of a dominant language and language of administration. Turkish is still widely spoken, for instance, on the in Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Bulgaria (Boeschoten 1998). Nowadays, one can observe a new wave of Turkic expan- sion via the vast Turkish diasporas that exist all over Europe. The volume under review represents an extended version of the proceed- ings of a conference that took place at the University of Cyprus in November, 2009. This background defines to a large extent the composition and content of the publication. The volume contains an introduction and 21 articles, which

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/25898833-12340012 Book Reviews 217 despite their heterogeneity form an informative and interesting collection of academic works. The articles are introduced in alphabetic order according to the authors’ names—a decision that can be easily questioned, consider- ing that the book clearly focuses on the two main topics, as can also be seen from its title. The two topics are (1) the minority languages and peoples of Turkey herself and (2) the Turkic languages and peoples in adjoining regions (Bulgaria, Greece, Iraq, and Cyprus). Beside these main topics, the book covers several thematic areas, including the (socio)linguistic description of relevant languages, language contacts, the self-identification of various communities, the history of relevant peoples, and the study of historical documents, as dis- cussed in the following (in this same order). The most detailed and impressive descriptions of minority languages of Turkey are given in two grammatical sketches. In the and beyond—Western Armenian at the crossroads: A sociolinguistic and typological sketch (pp. 89–148), Anaïd Donabedian gives a very detailed sociolinguistic and typologically-oriented grammatical description of West Armenian. This language is one of the variants of Modern Armenian and is almost completely extinct in , except for the Musa Dagh dialect (spoken on both sides of the border between Turkey and Syria and in Wakf in Hatay province in south- eastern Turkey), and the Hemshin dialect in the eastern Black Sea region. The author demonstrates that Western Armenian displays a combination of inherited and contact-induced features due to intensive multilingualism and especially intensive contacts with Turkish. The other thorough sociohistorical and grammatical study is devoted to the Kurmanji (northwestern) variety of Kurdish (Indo-European, Iranian). It is presented in the important article Kurmanji Kurdish in Turkey: Structure, variet- ies and status (pp. 157–229) by Geoffrey Haig and Ergin Öpengin. Despite being the largest variety of Kurdish, Kurmanji as a natural spoken language has been largely ignored even within Kurdish studies. Among other topics, the authors hypothesize on the Armenian influence on Kurmanji and discuss the status of the language in Turkey. In the article Turkic-speaking groups in Turkey: Theoretical prerequisites for the study of contact between closely related languages (pp. 29–34) Hendrik Boeschoten gives a short overview of Türkmen, which belongs to the East Oghuz branch of the Turkic family and is widely spoken in , and Afghanistan. In Turkey, the language is spoken in the town of Tokat by Türkmens (about 80 families) who arrived in 1983 from Afghanistan. In his article Semitic languages in Southeastern Turkey and Semitic-Iranian- contacts (pp. 231–239) Otto Jastrow surveys varieties of two Semitic languages, Aramaic and , spoken in southeastern Turkey. The

International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics 1 (2019) 211–236