Authors

Aliona Liubaya¹;  ¹ Warsaw University, Belarus

Discussion

In the early modern period, language was one of the factors determining human identity, along with religion and localisation. It was particularly important for ethnic minorities, closed groups that came to European countries from other regions. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, such a group was the Tartars, who arrived in several waves at the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 16th centuries. While their religious identity has never been questioned, researchers are still debating their language. At present, the majority of researchers believe that the Tatars stopped using dialects of the Tatar language early enough (since they came from different parts of Eurasia: from the Crimean Khanate of the Golden Horde and even from Siberia, it is most likely that they used different languages and dialects). However, in the court books of those regions where the Tatars lived compactly in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, it is regularly mentioned that the Tatars regularly signed 'in Arabic'.

In my essay I will show why the 'Arabic language' mentioned by the clerks of the GDL court chancellery cannot be identified. In turn, I will outline the range of sources that allow for a more meaningful picture of the linguistic situation in the Tatar community. They show that the linguistic assimilation of the Tatars in the GDL was much more complicated. Even in the 17th century, some Tatars signed property documents in Turkic languages, while at the same time signatures in the so-called Kitabic script (when the Slavic language was written in Arabic letters) are found no later than the 40s of the 16th century, which is much earlier than linguists claim. 

I will also try to analyse the factors that influenced this process. For example, the attempt to sacralise the foreign everyday language adopted by the Tatar minority, which was neither the language of the Koran nor the language in which its interpretation was written. We will also look at the role that attempts to integrate the nobility played in the emergence of this type of writing.