Armeno-Tat

Armeno-Tats (Armenian: հայ-թաթեր – hay-tater) are a distinct group of Tat-speaking Armenians that historically populated eastern parts of the South Caucasus. Most scholars researching the Tat language, such as Boris Miller and Igrar Aliyev, agree that Armeno-Tats are ethnic Armenians who underwent a language shift and adopted Tat as their first language. This is explained on one hand by the self-identification of Armeno-Tats who stated during Miller's research that they consider themselves Armenian as well as by some linguistic features of their dialect.

Adam Olearius travelled through the historical region of Shirvan (present-day central Azerbaijan) in 1637 and mentioned the existence of a community of Armenians in the city of Shamakhi, who "had its own language" but also "spoke Turkic, as did all people in Shirvan". Archaeologist Vladimir Sysoyev, who visited Shamakhi in 1925 and described ruins of a mediaeval Armenian church, held interviews with local residents who dated the first settlement of Armenians in Shamakhi and its vicinities to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Historically mountainous Shirvan was an area of mixed Tat-Azeri settlement with the former slowly assimilating into the latter.

Olearius, Bakikhanov and Miller noted a high rate of assimilation among Shirvan Armenians, with some adopting Muslim faith and diffusing in the majority (this went on well into the eighteenth century) and others shifting to the Tat language, while remaining Christian. By the early twentieth century, there were only two villages where Tat-speaking Christian Armenians continued to live: Madrasa and Kilvar. With regard to the origin of Armeno-Tats, Miller quotes bishop Mesrop Smbatian in stating that at least some groups of them were eighteenth-century migrants from Karabakh. Armenians of Kilvar claimed descent from mediaeval migrants from Edessa (present-day Şanlıurfa, Turkey). Comparing southern Tat dialects and Armeno-Tat, Miller concluded that Armenians of Madrasa may have been early migrants from the Absheron Peninsula where the presence of a Christian community was historically attested. Interestingly, some Armeno-Tats who had earlier switched to Tat as their first language, such as residents of Garajally, went on to switch to Azeri by the end of the eighteenth century.

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