As the name of a language, Karaim refers to West Kipchak Turkic varieties spoken in small religious communities situated in the territories of present-day Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. These communities are followers of the Karaite confession, which, according to the Karaim tradition, originates from a sect in the 8th-c. Jewish diaspora in Babylonia. The Karaites reject the authority of the Talmud and require their believers to read and interpret Biblical texts. This rejection has made it necessary to translate the Biblical texts into the non-Hebrew vernaculars of followers. For more about Karaitism, see Encyclopaedia Judaica (Lasker et al. 2007) and Polliack (2003).
As applied here, the ethnonym Karaim refers to the Turkic-speaking groups that historically converted to Karaitism and settled in Eastern European territories. The circumstances of this conversion are not documented. The main Karaim communities are the Crimean Karaim community, which is still the most populous, the Galician/Volhynian or Halich/Luck community, and the Lithuanian community, also called the Trakai (Polish Troki) community. There are also Karaim communities today in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Poland. It is only in the Lithuanian community that the language is still spoken, or at least remembered. Little is known about the Crimean Karaim language, whose speakers long ago shifted to the dominant languages of the area, Crimean Tatar and Russian.