Karaim

1. A Kipchak Turkic language, with Aramaic and Persian influences, spoken in Lithuania, Poland, the Crimea and the Ukraine.

   For more than six hundred years, Karaim has been spoken as a community language in what is today Lithuania.

   2001, Éva Ágnes Csató, “Syntactic code-copying in Karaim”, in Östen Dahl, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, editors, The Circum-Baltic Languages: Typology and Contact, volume 1, →ISBN, page 271

   1 more example

   At times the discrepancy can be even greater: only 12.8% of the Karaim, a Turkic-speaking group living for the most part in Lithuania, declared Karaim as their native language.

   1981, Bernard Comrie, The Languages of the Soviet Union, page 2

plural Karaims

1. A member of an ethnic group in Central and Eastern Europe which traditionally spoke this (Turkic) language and practiced Karaite Judaism.

   He began to develop closer relations with his Karaim subjects and issued a charter to a Karaim named Iosif to try again to establish a mint. The Karaim Rabbi wrote that after the Christians had left, […]

   1970, Alan W. Fisher, The Russian Annexation of the Crimea 1772-1783 →ISBN, page 120

   1 more example

   The term Karaim refers to both a people and to a religious system. Karaims are believers in the Old Testament but consider themselves to be of Turkic ethnic origin. They have traditionally used the Hebrew alphabet for writing their language, […]

   1998, Lars Johanson, The Turkic Languages, →ISBN, page 8

2. collectivepluralrarecollective plural of Karaim.

   The Karaim A Turkic-speaking group practising a branch of Judaism, the Karaim are thought to be descended from the Khazars, a central Asian people who held sway over a steppe empire stretching between the Black and Caspian seas […]

   2004, Jonathan Bousfield, Baltic States, →ISBN, page 102

   1 more example

   At times the discrepancy can be even greater: only 12.8% of the Karaim, a Turkic-speaking group living for the most part in Lithuania, declared Karaim as their native language. […] […] the Karaim, who are by religion (though not ethnically) Jews, a unique survival of the adoption of Judaism as the official religion of the Khazar empire […] […] The Karaim are being rapidly assimilated, ethnically and especially linguistically, to the surrounding Russian population.

   1981, Bernard Comrie, The Languages of the Soviet Union, pages 2, 47, and 49

3. rareA Karaite (especially an Eastern or Central European, Turkic-speaking one).

   He added that he was not "one of those Talmud Jews"; that he belonged to the American Reformed Church, known in Russia as the Karaim Jews. […] As soon as General Kosloff understood that Moses was a Karaim Jew, he told the consul-general to send the man to him the next morning […]

   1882 January 9, Wickham Hoffman, in a letter to Mr. Frelinghuysen, published in the Index to the Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the Second Session of the Forty-Seventh Congress, 1882-'83, page 44