mankurt.
A person with a lost or degraded cultural and ethnic identity or awareness about his or her ancestry, especially due to being affected by a dominant culture.
Meaning & usage
A person with a lost or degraded cultural and ethnic identity or awareness about his or her ancestry, especially due to being affected by a dominant culture.
Where this word comes from
Borrowed from Russian манкурт (mankurt). Coined by the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov in his novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980), in which people are turned into docile servants (mankurts) by exposing camel skin wrapped around their heads to the heat of the sun; the skins tighten as they dry, causing brain damage, such that the mankurts no longer recognize their name, family, or tribe—"a mankurt did not recognise himself as a human being". However, this term quickly became popular in the sense of "rootless person who forgot their cultural and ethnic identity," in the languages of Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.