The Lithuanian dialect of Karaim is spoken mainly in the town of Trakai by a small community living there since the 14th century.

[11] Furthermore, a large number of documents pertaining to the Crimean population of Karaims were burned during the 1736 Russian invasion of the Tatar Khanate's capital, Bakhchisarai.

[12] In one particular incidence, migration of Karaites from Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) to Crimea is documented following a fire in the Jewish quarter in 1203.

[12] On the other hand, "many scholars consider Karaims as descendants of Khazars and, later, Polovtsi tribes" who converted to Karaite Judaism.

The Karaim scholar Abraham Firkovich collected the documents arguing in favor of this theory before the Russian Tsar.

[12] Although linguistically sound, and in agreement with the tradition of the Lithuanian Tatars, claiming their origin from the collapsed Golden Horde,[17] some modern historians doubt this assumption.

[18][6] Nevertheless, Karaims settled primarily in Vilnius and Trakai, maintaining their Tatar language; there was also further minor settlement in Biržai, Pasvalys, Naujamiestis and Upytė.

Despite a history through the 16th and 17th centuries that included disease, famine, and pogroms, Lithuania was somewhat less affected by such turmoil than the surrounding areas.

One hypothesis is that Khazar nobility converted to Karaite Judaism in the late 8th or early 9th century and were followed by a portion of the general population.

Karaim has a historically subject–object–verb word order, extensive suffixing agglutination, the presence of vowel harmony, and a lack of gender or noun classes.

Most of the religious terminology in the Karaim language is Arabic in etymology, showing the origins of the culture in the Middle East.

Karaim speakers also communicate with the dominant languages of their respective regions, including Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian.

Similarly to most Turkic languages, virtually all of the consonants in Karaim exist in both a palatalized and a non-palatalized form, which may be further evidence of their genetic relationship.

Nouns are inflected for seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative, and instrumental, which is rare in other Turkic languages).

However, it appears to have acquired somewhat free word order due to extensive language contact situations, and currently has a preference for SVO constructions.

[25] Due to the agglutinative nature of Karaim morphology, pronominal subjects are frequently dropped as the same information is already represented in the inflection of the main verb.

In many Karaite families, they still have Hebrew letter handwritten collection of texts of diverse content, referred to as "miedžuma".