A couple of weeks ago, Cambridge Ukrainian Studies held its 2023 Vsesvit evening, an annual event celebrating language, translation, and music in Ukraine.  This year was dedicated to Crimean Tatar, the Turkic language spoken in Crimea.  Among the readers (and singers) was Elmaz Asan, an incredible Crimean Tatar journalist and scholar who is currently on a research placement in Cambridge.  You can read about Elmaz and her experience of being forced from two homelands by Russian invaders – Crimea in 2014 and then Ukraine in 2022 – and how she is adapting to life in Cambridge in this University piece.

The University Library has sadly few books in Crimean Tatar, but their numbers are slowly growing.  Two books were added this week, among a group of 30 new Ukrainian ebooks.  These two are language-learning books and not usual fare for the UL, but we felt it important to buy what is available.  The strong turnout at the Vsesvit event showed how much interest there is in Crimea and also how much feeling there is for Crimean Tatars, and hopefully these two new books will be useful to those who are trying out the language.

One is a self-study book for Crimean Tatar (Qırımtatar tili : ögretici kitap, from which the snapshot of Ukraine here comes) which I think might be a challenge (but hopefully a good one!) for anyone learning without outside help.  The other is a Crimean Tatar–Ukrainian phrasebook (Krymsʹkotatarsʹka mova : krymsʹkotatarsʹko-ukraïnsʹkyĭ rozmovnyk).  Both books are the work of Abibulla Seit-Celil, an academic at the Taras Shevchenko Kyïv National University, who you can in fact see being interviewed by Elmaz in Crimean Tatar only a couple of weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  The new book she interviews him about, Crimean Tatar language for foreigners, we will certainly try to get hold of as soon as possible.

Crimea and Crimean Tatar literature have long been a major focus of research for Cambridge Ukrainian Studies’ Rory Finnin, whose 2022 book Blood of Others : Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity is available online here and also in print at 758:65.c.202.4.

In terms of the few other books in Crimean Tatar that we have, these are the pre-2010 titles:

• A 2007 Crimean Tatar–Russian dictionary published in Crimea.
• A 1999 book donated to us about biodiversity conservation in Crimea, which has a summary in Crimean Tatar, published in Washington, DC.
• A 1980 selection of Crimean Tatar literary texts published in Germany.
• A 1970 collection of Crimean Tatar proverbs published in Turkey.

We have a few more recent print books too.  The Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar poetry contest Qırım inciri = Krymsʹkyĭ inz︠h︡yr (Crimean Fig) started in 2018, with each year’s contest seeing an anthology published.  We have the first two anthologies (the first published in 2019 and the second published in 2020, cover shown here) and are collecting the latest volumes too.  The UL also has a 2016 facsimile of the 17th-century Crimean Tatar chronicle Üçüncü İslâm Giray Han tarihi by Mehmet Senai.

Even the few books we have contain examples of the three alphabets Crimean Tatar has been written in: Latin, Arabic, and Cyrillic.

This certainly won’t be the only post about Crimean Tatar here.  It’s a language which deserves more attention, and I rather wonder if we may have more material in it still to come to light due to poor metadata from the past (when many Turkic languages were classified either as Turkish or put together under a catch-all Turkic heading).  Let’s see.

Mel Bach