Abstract This paper investigates ditransitive constructions in Caucasian Urum, an Anatolian variety of Turkish spoken in the Small Caucasus in Georgia, which reveals strong influences from its contact language Russian. The study presented in this paper compares the effect of givenness on the linearization of the two verbal arguments (indirect and direct objects) in Turkish, Russian and Caucasian Urum. The results of the study are two-fold. Firstly, the results reveal that the verb in the Urum descriptions either precede, follow or occur between the two objects, whereas the Turkish and the Russian native speakers in the study solely use V-final or V-initial orders, respectively. Secondly, the results show a strong effect of givenness on the order of recipients and patients in Turkish and Russian, whereas the Urum descriptions show a general preference for IOiDO orders, independent from givenness. Further analyses on the data imply that neither word order nor morphological markers, such as case marking or the use of articles, are reliable factors in order to determine the discourse status of objects in Urum.