On Dialectal Vocabulary in the Speech of the Descendants of Muhajir Georgians – I

Abstract

The descendants of Georgian muhajirs in Turkey represent a bilingual ethnic group, compactly settled across three major regions of the country - the Central Black Sea coast (from Giresun to Sinop), the South-Western Black Sea region (Düzce and Sakarya provinces), and the Marmara coastal zone (predominantly within Bursa Province). Their present-day Kartvelian speech reflects a continuation of the Adjarian dialect and the Chkhalian variety of the Khopa dialect. Since the late nineteenth century, these speech forms have developed in relative isolation from the literary Georgian language and other Kartvelian dialects, while continuing to reflect the influence of Turkish.
Naturally, within the lexical inventory of the Adjarian dialect preserved in the speech of the muhajir descendants, archaic lexical units are retained, either in unchanged or modified forms. The present article focuses on this lexical layer, specifically, on terms denoting value, or more precisely, money: marčili – (“metal currency”) and naari – (“paper currency”). The Laz forms Geareli//Genareri (in the sense of “money”) provide compelling evidence that Naar derives from a Megrelian-Laz lexical base, containing
the root
ar- (“to write”), which is identifiable and semantically congruent with the referent (Na-
ar-a „written“, Ge
arili/Ge
areli „ inscribed, engraved“). Notably, the inscriptions impressed upon coinage — the “legend” — were referred to in Georgian literary tradition as zeda
erili (“that which is written above”). The lexical unit našali, linked to the root šal-, dašla (“to divide, to separate”), is also analyzed. In the speech of the muhajir descendants, sesxi/sesxoba is used only to denote a month. Nevertheless, we still discussed it, because the broader Kartvelian semantic field of the root also encompasses the meaning of money temporarily lent.
The main lexical corpus of the speech of Georgian muhajir descendants has been largely preserved. Naturally, part of the vocabulary is composed of loanwords; nevertheless, an enduring connection with the broader Common Kartvelian linguistic continuum has not been disrupted to this day.