Tsalka language
dialect of Turkish
Tsalka is an East-Anatolian dialect of Turkish spoken by Tsalka Greeks who mainly inhabit the Tsalka and Tetritsqaro municipalities in Georgia.
Sociolinguistic status
Not all Tsalka Greeks speak Tsalka; there are many Pontic Greek speakers. Tsalka is exclusively a spoken language and has no writing system.
The name Tsalka language is not used by its speakers; instead, they use descriptive terms like "bizim dili" ("our language"). Tsalka Greeks also call their language Musulmandzha (the Muslim language) and often identify as Urums as a result of the belief that people's ethnic identity is defined by the genetic relationships of their language; this view was heavily promoted by the Soviet bureaucracy. At the same time, they are offended by the claim that they are not real Greeks because of the Turkish influence. According to Garkavets, Orthodox Mariupol Urums who also speak a Turkic language have no similar insecurity in relation to their language.
Speaking Tsalka is not prestigious and is seen as shameful or a curse, but the speakers believe that switching from Greek to Tsalka has enabled them to preserve their Orthodox Christian faith; they see it in contrast with the conversion of Pontic Greeks into Islam while maintaining their Hellenic language. The actual reason for the abandonment of language is unknown, and is not typical for ethnic minorities in Ottoman Empire (see the opposite cases in Bosnia, Herzsegovina, Albania and Greece); it is being theorised that the language shift occurred in the urban population while more rural Pontic Greeks retained a Hellenic dialect.
Tsalka became less stigmatised after dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 as its partial intelligibility had facilitated trading with Turkey.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4503058. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tsalka language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.