The dialect spoken by the Tsalka Urums is similar to The Meskhetian - Ahiska Turks an Eastern Anatolian dialect of Turkish, which hails from the regions of Kars, Ardahan, and Artvin.The Turkish Meskhetian - Ahiska dialect has also borrowed from other languages (including Azerbaijani,Georgian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Russian, and Uzbek) which the Meskhetian - Ahiska Turks have been in contact with during the Russian and Soviet rule.However some linguists, like Nikolai Baskakov, classify it as a separate Oghuz language due to differences in phonetics, vocabulary and grammar. Present-day Urum Turkish is also thought by some to be phonetically closer to Azeri than to the literary Turkish, which leads them to believe that it is rather a dialect of Azeri. Late Soviet censuses also showed Azeri as the mother tongue of the Tsalka Urums, however this may have been done simply due to the Soviets' somewhat unfavourable attitude towards Turkish culture. No secondary education in Urum Turkish has been available; its speakers attended schools where subjects were taught in Azeri and later in Russian.