Romeyka
Alternative name(s): -
Language family: Indo-European
Language Group: Greek
Geographical use: An isolated community near the Black Sea coast in a cluster of villages near the Turkish city of Trabzon
Information: Romeyka is a dialect, a variety of Pontic Greek, with structural similarities to ancient Greek that are not observed in other forms of the language spoken today. Romeyka's vocabulary also has parallels with the ancient language.
Ioanna
Sitaridou, a lecturer in romance philology at the University of
Cambridge, said: "Romeyka preserves an impressive number of grammatical
traits that add an ancient Greek flavour to the dialect's structure,
traits that have been completely lost from other modern Greek varieties.
"Use
of the infinitive has been lost in all other Greek dialects known today
– so speakers of Modern Greek would say 'I wasn't able that I go'
instead of 'I wasn't able to go'. But, in Romeyka, not only is the
infinitive preserved, but we also find quirky infinitival constructions
that have never been observed before – only in the Romance languages
are there parallel constructions."
The villagers who speak
Romeyka, which has no written form, show other signs of geographic and
cultural isolation. They rarely marry outside their own community and
they play a folk music on a special instrument, called a kemenje in Turkish and Romeyka or lyra as it is called in Greek,
Dr Sitaridou said. "I only know of one man who married outside his own
village," she said. "The music is distinctive and cannot be mistaken
for anything else. It is clearly unique to the speakers of Romeyka."
One
possibility is that Romeyka speakers today are the direct descendants
of ancient Greeks who lived along the Black Sea coast millennia ago –
perhaps going back to the 6th or 7th centuries BC when the area was
first colonised. But it is also possible that they may be the
descendants of indigenous people or an immigrant tribe who were
encouraged or forced to speak the language of the ancient Greek
colonisers.
Romeykas-speakers today are devout Muslims, so they
were allowed to stay in Turkey after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, when
some two million Christians and Muslims were exchanged between Greece
and Turkey. Repeated waves of emigration, the dominant influence of the
Turkish-speaking majority, and the complete absence of Romeyka from the
public arena, have now put it on the list of the world's most
endangered languages.
"With as few as 5,000 speakers left in the
area, before long, Romeyka could be more of a heritage language than a
living vernacular. With its demise would go an unparalleled opportunity
to unlock how the Greek language has evolved," said Dr Sitaridou.
"Imagine if we could speak to individuals whose grammar is closer to
the language of the past. Not only could we map out a new grammar of a
contemporary dialect but we could also understand some forms of the
language of the past. This is the opportunity that Romeyka presents us
with."
Studies of the grammar of Romeyka show that it shares a
startling number of similarities with Koine Greek of Hellenistic and
Roman times, which was spoken at the height of Greek influence across
Asia Minor between the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD.
Modern Greek,
meanwhile, has undergone considerable changes from its ancient
counterpart, and is thought to have emerged from the later Medieval
Greek spoken between the 7th and 13th Centuries AD – so-called
Byzantine Greek.
Future research will try to assess how Pontic
Greek from the Black Sea coast evolved over the centuries. "We know
that Greek has been continuously spoken in Pontus since ancient times
and can surmise that its geographic isolation from the rest of the
Greek-speaking world is an important factor in why the language is as
it is today," Dr Sitaridou said. "What we don't yet know is whether
Romeyka emerged in exactly the same way as other Greek dialects but
later developed its own unique characteristics which just happen to
resemble archaic Greek.
Many of the world's languages are
disappearing as once-isolated populations become part of the global
economy, with children failing to learn the language of their
grandparents and instead using the dominant language of the majority
population, which in this part of the world is Turkish.
"In
Pontus, we have near-perfect experimental conditions to assess what may
be gained and what may be lost as a result of language contact," Dr
Sitaridou said.
(source: The Independent)
