Armeno-Kipchak (Xıpçaχ tili, Tatarça)[2] was a Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak branch of the family that was spoken in Crimea during the 14–15th centuries. The language has been documented from the literary monuments of 16–17th centuries written in 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.[3]
^ abCurtin, Philip D. (1984). Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 186. ISBN0-521-26931-8. The Armenian trade northwest around the Black Sea was harder to maintain over long periods of time. In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, for example, it was very active. Armenians who settled at Crimean ports like Kaffa carried the overland trade to feed the Genoese seaborne trade diaspora to the Black Sea. These Crimean Armenians not only carried goods back toward their homeland; they also ran caravans still farther west through present-day Rumania and Poland and beyond to Nuremberg in Germany and Bruges in the Low Countries. Their colonies in Crimea were so large that the Genoese sometimes called it Armenia maritima. In that news base, Armenians also began to take on elements of the local, Tatar culture. They kept their Armenian identity, and loyalty to the Armenian church, but they began to speak Tatar as home language and even to write in with Armenian script.
^"Armeno-Kipchak". Encyclopaedia of Islam. Vol. X. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers. 2000. pp. 708–709. The Armenians of south-western Ukraine (originating from the Crimean community) were in permanent contact with Kipcak Turks through their trading activities. As a result, they accepted this linguistic idiom as their administrative and religious language. Of this we possess many 16th-17th century records (official documents, language manuals, religious texts, etc.) which reflect a specific dialect of the Kipcak languages.
