Ubykhs have Lost Their Language but Not Their Identity, Circassian Activist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 18 – Russian officials regularly that the Ubykhs do not exist, noting that the last Ubykh speaker died in the 1990s; and many Western observers of the North Caucasus, following this logic, draw a similar conclusion. But Kase Kik, a Circassian activist, says that while the Ubykhs have lost their language, they have not lost their identity.

            A subgroup of the Circassian nation who lived in the mountain highlands and were among the most active participants in North Caucasian resistance to the Russian advance into their homeland, the Ubykhs were expelled to the Ottoman Empire as part of the Russian genocide against the Circassian nation as a whole.

            In the Ottoman Empire, Ubykh leaders encouraged their people to learn Turkish so that their children could make careers; and in the absence of official support for their native language and their tradition of speaking more than one language, they gradually lost Ubykh, one of the  regmost difficult languages in the world.

            (For background on the Ubykh people and the fate of their language, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2016/12/can-ubykh-one-of-worlds-hardest.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2014/10/window-on-eurasia-can-ubykh-language.html and the sources cited therein.)

            The Ubykh language disappeared as a living tongue when the last native speaker died 30 years ago, but Kase Kik, a Circassian activist says that their historical memory and identity have not and that they are “an inalienable part of the common history of the Circassian people” (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/425017).

            Ubykhs take part in all Circassian actions, he continues, both in the diaspora and in the homeland. Indeed, Kik suggests, they are fully part of the Circassian nation and will remain so and like other Circassians want the right to return to their homeland and would like to see their language revived.

            But the Ubykhs are realists, the activist says, and recognize that however much some activists may try to revive the language, only a concerted state program in a restored Circassian republic will be able to succeed in doing that.