The Great Death in Hacıosman: When a Language Died With Its Last Voice

On a quiet night in 1992, Tevfik Esenç closed his eyes for the last time, taking 84 consonant sounds and a whole ancient culture to the grave with him.

By: Zulfan Munada Ardan Nahara (30802400009)

TEVFIK ESENÇ died in October 1992 in Hacıosman, a village in northwestern Turkey. To his neighbors, he was a respected former village leader, a hard-working farmer, and a keeper of stories. To linguists and historians around the world, his death was a tragic moment in human history. With his final breath, the Ubykh language, which had been spoken for centuries in the steep valleys of the Western Caucasus, officially went extinct.  There were no big national monuments built for Ubykh, and no state funerals shown on TV. When Tevfik Esenç died at the age of 88, an entire worldview, centuries of old oral traditions, unique folklore, and a linguistic masterpiece vanished in a single night. That loss was not just a list of words or grammar rules. It was the total silencing of a civilization's collective memory.

The story of the fall of the Ubykh language cannot be separated from the history of its people. At first, they lived in the mountains along the coast of Circassia, next to the Black Sea, in a community like family. The language was well known among linguists because it was extremely complex. While modern English uses about 24 consonants, Ubykh had 84 different consonants, including complex uvular and pharyngeal fricatives, ejectives, and labialized stops, and only 2 vowels. It was a linguistic landscape of sharp sounds and deep airflow that reflected the wild mountain winds and rivers of their Caucasus home.

A historical tragedy changed the fate of the Ubykh people. In 1864, after the Circassian genocide in the Caucasus by Russia, the Ubykh people were forced to leave their homeland and were scattered across the Ottoman Empire.

To survive in exile, the younger generation started speaking Turkish and Adyghe, a neighboring Caucasian language. Schools taught in Turkish, the markets ran on Turkish, and daily life required them to fit in. Over time, the Ubykh language was pushed out of schools, markets, and streets into the corners of homes, and finally, into memory alone.

In the middle of the 20th century, Tevfik Esenç knew something important: he was one of the very few people who could still speak the Ubykh language in its original form. He was raised by his grandparents who had lived in the Caucasian homeland, and he learned more than just words. He learned the rhythm of the language, the way it danced in poetry, proverbs passed down for generations, and myths that told the stories of his ancestors.

Esenç was determined not to let his heritage disappear without anyone noticing. He spent decades of his life working with international linguists, including Hans Vogt from Norway and George Hewitt from England. Most importantly, his close friendship and professional partnership was with the French scholar, Georges Dumézil. For many years, Dumézil traveled to Turkey and sometimes Esenç traveled to France. Together they spent hundreds of hours carefully documenting the language.

Esenç sat quietly in front of a tape recorder, repeating the sounds over and over, explaining old proverbs, and telling traditional stories. He was not just a source of information, but a partner with a deep understanding of how his language worked. He knew that every word he spoke was a stone in a monument that would outlive him.

In a 1987 documentary film, Son Sesler (The Last Voices), Esenç talked about the heavy sadness of carrying a dying language:

"I will suddenly remember (my tongue), repeat its last words… So that they are not forgotten, the last voices. I have seen many deaths. I have had a long life, I am too tired now. My heart will not last long, I know… I want to tell them in my mother tongue, forgetting and being forgotten."

The extinction of Ubykh is not an isolated case. According to UNESCO, nearly 40% of the world's seven thousand languages are endangered, and experts estimate that one language disappears every two weeks or so. Each one takes away an irreplaceable library of traditional knowledge, oral literature, and a different way of seeing the universe.

When a language dies, humanity loses a unique lens through which reality is built. Without native speakers, a language becomes static text on paper or cold audio files in a digital archive, without the warmth, rhythm, and life that only human breath can give.

Esenç understood this loss better than anyone. Before he died, he wrote an inscription for his own tombstone in his village. Written in Turkish, the inscription is a quiet reminder for anyone who passes by:

"Vubıh dilini ölümsüzleştiren, bu dili yazıp konuşabilen son Vubıh", (The last Ubykh who could write and speak this language, and who immortalized it).

Today, Esenç's voice recordings remain saved in academic archives, including the Pangloss collection in Paris. Listening to them is a bitter experience. We hear a man carrying the weight of all his people on his vocal cords, a man who refused to leave the world without leaving a trace of who his people were.

The story of Tevfik Esenç and the death of the Ubykh language is a powerful warning for our increasingly globalized world. It shows how political exile, cultural pressure, and public neglect can erase centuries of linguistic heritage in just a little over a century. More importantly, it reminds us that language is not just a tool. Language is the living soul of a culture. When we lose a language, we do not just lose words; we lose a part of what it means to be human.