Editing Karaim language (section)

===Language contact===
	Throughout its long and complicated history, Karaim has experienced extensive language contact. A past rooted in [[Mesopotamia]] and persisting connections to the Arab world resulted in Arabic words which likely carried over via the migration of Karaites from Mesopotamia{{Citation needed|date=November 2022}}. The Karaim language was spoken in Crimea during the rule of the Ottoman Empire, so there is also a significant history of contact with Turkish, a distant relative in the Turkic language family. Finally, Karaim coexisted with Lithuanian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian as a minority language in the other areas to which it dispersed where Karaims lived and had to speak the dominant majority languages.

Karaim speakers show a strong tendency towards code-copying.{{sfn|Csató|2001}} Code-copying differs from [[code-switching]] in that speakers don't just switch from one language to another, but actually transfer lexical items and grammatical features from one language to another in processes that may be only for single instances, or that may have much more lasting effects on [[language typology]].{{sfn|Csató|2001}} Extensive code-copying is indicative both of the ever-shrinking population of Karaim speakers (leading to an insufficient Karaim lexicon and a high frequency of borrowing from [[Russian language|Russian]], [[Polish language|Polish]], and [[Church Slavonic language|Slavonic languages]]) and of the high level of language contact in the regions where Karaim is spoken.{{sfn|Csató|2012}}