Rescuing an ancient Greek dialect

It has no writing system but it is spoken, mainly by elderly Muslim women in the Trabzon (Trebizond, historically) region in northern Turkey by a population that ranges between 4,000 and 8,000 people, according to estimates. It has archaic structures and forms, like infinitives and negation, that testify to its roots in Hellenistic Greek. And while it has much to teach us about Greek dialects and the history of the Black Sea, it can also enhance our understanding of belonging and multicultural identities, the Romeyka of Turkey, a variety of Pontic that did not have the means – or the necessary “army and navy,” to use a linguistic witticism – to endure over time, and is now at serious risk of extinction.

“Young people under the age of 20 no longer speak the language because it is no longer being passed on,” says Dr Ioanna Sitaridou, a professor of historical linguistics and Spanish and Portuguese at Cambridge University. “The main factors driving Romeyka to language death,” she continues, “are the lack of support mechanisms – such as education – changes in the traditional way of life and migration to cities and to Europe, as well as social and cultural stigma and Turkey’s national ideology, which continues to strive for absorbing linguistic minorities and promoting the national language as the only available option.”

Sitaridou has spent the past 16 years studying Romeyka in the Trabzon districts of Caykara, Surmene and Tonya. Pinning down the number of natural speakers, she explains, is problematic from a methodological, legal and practical perspective. She recently enhanced her research toolbox, however, with the digital platform “Crowdsourcing Romeyka” (crowdsource.romeyka.org), inviting people from all over the world who still speak the language to record themselves, and by doing so, to create a repository of their endangered speech while also giving researchers a valuable resource.

The aim of the “Crowdsourcing Romeyka” platform, explains Sitaridou, “is to allow Pontic speakers, regardless of where they are, to preserve their language by making it accessible to the world and to researchers. You can’t compare it with recording the language in the actual field, but it does allow for fast linguistic data collection. Given how inaccessible some communities are and how quickly native speakers are vanishing, it provides a satisfactory solution, which can also form a bridge between the tech-savvy younger speakers and the elderly.”

The aim of the ‘Crowdsourcing Romeyka’ platform ‘is to allow Pontic speakers, regardless of where they are, to preserve their language by making it accessible to the world and to researchers’

The older speakers tend to be women because the men have migrated from the villages since 1960, she adds. Sitaridou traces the roots of Romeyka to between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, that is 500 years before medieval times, which is where other theories place the dialect’s origin.

Sitaridou has put forward the (hypo)thesis that Romeyka is an offshoot of a localized Asia Minor Greek koine, which is a form of a Hellenistic Greek koine. The latter, she argues, could not have been spoken in exactly the same way from Alexandria all the way to Asia Minor. “It doesn’t make linguistic sense,” she says, outlining her belief that “Pontic is the sister, not the daughter of Modern Greek.”

“I argue, without excluding the need for further revision, that there is more than one Greek language, as is the case with Latin-based languages, which stem from Vulgar Latin and not one from the other, as is the prevailing view about Modern Greek and the Modern Greek dialects,” says Sitaridou.

Infinitives

The key to Sitaridou’s analysis of Romeyka is the infinitive form of the verb, which was gradually dropped from other Greek varieties over the centuries, but endures in this one. Romeyka, by virtue of being spoken on the fringes of the Byzantine Empire, maintained more infinitival uses given this isolation. Moreover, the subsequent Islamization of parts of the Trebizond region (which was conquered by the Ottomans in 1461) signaled a dual evolutionary path: On the one hand, the Pontic varieties spoken by the Christians remained close to the medieval ones, which were in the process of dropping the infinitives, while, on the other hand, the varieties of Islamized speakers, like Romeyka, kept them while reanalyzing them into a negative polarity item, which resulted in strengthening their position in the grammar.

Sitaridou’s latest hypothesis concerns the district of Tonya, where it appears that Islamization took place at a different time. The professor is writing a paper on the subject.

In the meantime, there is an exhibition running until April 28 at the Mehmet Ali House in Kavala, northern Greece, on the subject of Romeyka, with a wealth of photographic and archival material from the Greek-speaking communities on the southern shores of the Black Sea from the archives of Exeter College in Oxford and the British School at Athens, as recorded by Richard MacGillivray Dawkins 110 years ago, as well as from Sitaridou’s archive.

Beyond the different theories, what is certain, however, is the indelible link between national identity and language/dialect. “The formation of national identities as we view them today is a much more recent phenomenon than language,” says Sitaridou. “However, a language or a dialect is the foundation stone of the sense of belonging to a linguistic, ethnic and/or cultural group or community.”