For more than six hundred years, Karaim has been spoken as a community language in the territory of today's Lithuania and Ukraine. Due to the political measures taken by the post-war Soviet regime, the communities are now dispersed and their language has become endangered. The number of Karaims in Lithuania is about two hundred but only a fourth of them, mostly members of the eldest generation, still have a communicative competence in the language. Karaim speakers of Lithuania are multilingual, also having command of the regional or transregional dominant languages: Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. The functional domain of the Karaim language is restricted to everyday conversational situations in the family and with a few Karaim friends. Karaim also plays an important role in religious practice, since songs and prayers are both in Karaim and Hebrew.

References:

- Karaim in UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/en/atlasmap/language-id-379.html .

- Ethnologue - Languages of the World
http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/en/atlasmap/language-id-379.html