An endangered Greek language spoken by just a few thousand people in remote mountain villages in northern Turkey has been described as a “living bridge” to the ancient world after researchers discovered more features in common with Homer’s language. and modern Greek.
The exact number of Romeyka users is difficult to quantify. It has no written form but is passed down orally in the mountain villages around Trabzon, near the Black Sea coast.
With the dialect now threatened with extinction as its remaining speakers age, a Cambridge University academic has launched a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to document its unique language structure before it’s too late.
The crowdsourced Romeyka project invites native speakers around the world to upload recordings of their conversations in the language. Ioanna Sitaridou, a professor of Spanish and historical linguistics, said she expected many might be in the United States and Australia, and spread across Europe.
“There is a very important diaspora that is divided by religion and national identity [from the communities in Turkey]but still shared a lot,” she said.
Sitaridou believes that Romeca did not develop from modern Greek, but derived from Hellenistic forms of the language spoken in the centuries before Christ and shared some key features with ancient Greek.
An example is the infinitive form of the verb, which is still used in Romeyka in ancient Greek. So while a modern Greek speaker would say “I want I go,” Romeka retains the ancient form “I want to go.” By the early Middle Ages this structure had become obsolete in all other Greek variants.
As a result, Sitaridou concluded that “Romeca is the sister, not the daughter, of modern Greek,” a finding she says undermines the idea that modern Greek is an “isolated” language, meaning that it Has nothing to do with any other European language. .
The scholar stated that modern Greek and Romanecan were not mutually intelligible; she suggested that an appropriate comparison would be between speakers of Portuguese and Italian, both languages descended from Vulgar Latin, rather than derived from each other.
Although the history of the Greek presence on the Black Sea is not always easy to relate to legend, the Greek language expanded with the spread of Christianity. “Conversion to Islam in Asia Minor was usually accompanied by a linguistic shift to Turkish, but communities in the valley retained their Romanecan language,” Sitaridou said.
In contrast, the Greek-speaking community that remained Christian became closer to modern Greek, especially because of the widespread development of Greek-language education in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 saw Turkey and Greece exchange Christian and Muslim populations, but since the Romanecan-speaking communities in the Trabzon region were Muslim, they remained in their homeland.
However, Sitaridou said the language is now endangered due to extensive contact with Turkish, cultural stigma and immigration. The region has a high proportion of native speakers over the age of 65, and fewer young people are learning the language.
Does she think online initiatives can help save Romeyka as a living language? “Obviously I love all languages and I want to see them preserved,” she said. “But I’m not one of those people who believes that language must be protected at all costs. At the end of the day, it’s not entirely up to me. If the speaker decides to deliver it, that’s great. If the speaker chooses not to deliver it, that’s theirs choose.
“What is important to these people? [minority] For these language groups, the purpose is to maintain a sense of belonging and self. Because it connects them to their past, no matter how you view your past.
“When speakers can speak their native language, they feel seen and thus feel more connected to the rest of society. On the other hand, not speaking a heritage or minority language can cause some form of trauma, thereby… …destroying integration.”
