Armeno-Kipchak (Xñpçaàtili, Tatarça) was a Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak branch of the family that was spoken in Crimea during the 14âÂÂ15th centuries. The language has been documented from the literary monuments of 16âÂÂ17th centuries written in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (modern day Ukraine) in the Armenian script. Armeno-Kipchak resembles the language of Codex Cumanicus, which was compiled in the 13th century.
Speakers of the Armeno-Kipchak are considered to be linguistically assimilated Armenians. Armeno-Kipchak-speakers generally identified as Armenian.
Armenians began settling in Crimea in the 11th century and underwent linguistic assimilation in the 14th and 15th centuries.
From Crimea, mainly the city of Feodosia, they resettled to parts of modern-day Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Moldova. Written monuments from Armenian Apostolic Church centres located in these regions are the reason the Armeno-Kipchak language is known.
In these monuments, the language refers to itself in three ways: with the older term àÃÂÿÃÂðàÃÂøûø (en: Kipchak language), the possessive construction ñø÷øü ÃÂøû (en: our language), and the later comparative terminological combination ÃÂðÃÂðÃÂÃÂð (en: in Tatar), which became widespread thanks to translators familiar with Crimean Tatar.
Armeno-Kipchak has 9 vowels: ð, ÃÂ, õ, ÃÂ, ø, þ, ç, ÃÂ, ñ.
It contained many loanwords from Ukrainian, Polish and Latin, especially in translated texts, as well as Iranian and Arabic influences.
The grammatical system was greatly affected by in the influence of Slavonic languages.
The monuments were written in the period 1521 to 1669 in Armenian script. They consist of tens of thousands of pages. In total there are 112 surviving monuments. These include: