Discovering the prehistory of multilingual situations in the lexicon. An empirical study on the Caucasian Urum vocabulary
Journal: Linguistik Online
Year: 2014

Multilingual situations are reflected in the lexicon; by consequence, lexical borrowings are powerful evidence for language contact in the prehistory of linguistic communities. This article presents an empirical study on the lexical knowledge of Caucasian Urum speakers, i. e., ethnic Greek speakers in the Small Caucasus, who are bilingual in a variety of Turkish (Urum) and Russian. The analysis is based on the established assumption that certain concepts are cross-linguistically associated with