Learn Ahiska Turkish — by playing
Ahıska Lingo is a free app that teaches the language of our grandparents through play: quizzes, flashcards, a word-guessing game and long backgammon. It runs in the browser, installs on your phone and opens without internet.
What is inside
- Words and phrases 1355
- Translation languages english · русский · türkçe
- Folk proverbs 732
- Dialect rules 37
- Verbs in three tenses 125
- Price free
What is Ahiska Turkish
Ahiska Turkish (Ahıska Türkçesi) is a living dialect of Turkish spoken by the Ahiska Turks. It is closest to the speech of the Upper Kura and Çoruh region — Posof, Ardahan, Şavşat, Artvin, Ardanuç and Oltu share its features.
It differs from standard Turkish in ways you can hear at once: verbs end in -mah instead of -mak (gelmah, getmah), the past tense is always -di, the future is -acah. At the same time every fourth word in our dictionary is identical to standard Turkish — if you know Turkish, you already know a quarter of it.
The dialect keeps sounds the Turkish alphabet cannot write: ə — between a and e, q — a deep throaty k, x — a rasping h. So we write the word in Turkish letters and give the pronunciation beside it: Pencere [Pəncərə] — window.
Who are the Ahiska Turks
A people from the Akhaltsikhe region in southern Georgia — the land they themselves call Ahıska. In November 1944 the entire population was deported to Central Asia. Since then the Ahiska Turks have lived scattered: in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Russia, Turkey and the United States, where Dayton, Ohio holds one of the largest communities.
When a people is scattered, the language goes first — not by ban, but by silence: at home everyone switches to the language of the country, and children hear their own less and less. This app was made against that silence.
Where the words come from
The dictionary is built from the founder's own collection, from Kamran's collection (originally in Cyrillic, transliterated), and from basic vocabulary. The proverbs come from Asif Hacılı's «Ahıska Türk Folkloru». The classification of the dialect follows Serdar Bulut's «Ahıska Bölgesi Türkleri Ağzından Derleme Sözlüğüne Katkılar-I» (2017).
Pronunciation and disputed meanings are checked by native speakers. No word is added automatically: a meaning that no speaker has confirmed does not enter the dictionary.
Know a word we are missing?
The app has a «Suggest a word» form in its settings. The most valuable words are the ones only the elders remember: household objects, customs, dish names, children's rhymes. They are in no dictionary — they live in memory.