Word.ws English Dictionary

mankurt

mankurt noun: 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.

Noun

mankurt (plural mankurts)

  1. (derogatory, uncommon) 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.
    • A mankurt differs from a renegade in that a renegade primarily betrays their community, while a mankurt primarily betrays themself. The mankurt's lost identity is a de-centering problem, […]2023, Stephen W. Hiemstra, Image and Illumination: A Study of Christian Anthropology

Forms of mankurt

pluralmankurts

Origin of mankurt

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.

Questions about mankurt

What does mankurt mean?
Mankurt means 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.
What part of speech is mankurt?
Mankurt is a noun.
What is the plural of mankurt?
The plural of mankurt is mankurts.

Words near mankurt in the dictionary

  1. Mankowitz
  2. Mankowski
  3. Mankowskis
  4. manks
  5. Manktelow
  6. mankurt
  7. mankurts
  8. manky
  9. manky mallard
  10. manky mallards
  11. Manlayag

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mankurt (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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