A new data crowdsourcing platform aims to preserve the sound of the romeyka, an endangered ancient variety of Greek. Experts consider this language to be a linguistic gold mine and a living bridge to the ancient world.
The initiative, led by Professor Ioanna Sitaridou of the University of Cambridge, contributes to the UN International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-32), which aims to “draw global attention to the critical situation of many indigenous languages and mobilize stakeholders and resources. for its preservation, revitalization and promotion.’
Romeyka is believed to have only a couple of thousand native speakers left in the Trabzon region of Turkey, but the exact number is difficult to estimate, especially given the fact that there are also large numbers of native speakers in the diaspora and the current linguistic change towards Turkish.
Romeyka does not have a writing system and has been transmitted only orally. Extensive contact with Turks, the absence of support mechanisms to facilitate intergenerational transmission, sociocultural stigma and migration have taken their toll on Romeyka. A high proportion of native speakers in Trabzon are over 65 years old and fewer young people are learning the language.
The recently launched trilingual Crowdsourcing platform Romeyka (https://crowdsource.romeyka.org/) invites audiences from anywhere in the world to upload audio recordings of Romeyka speaking.
“Speech crowdsourcing is a new tool that helps speakers build a repository of spoken data for their endangered languages, while allowing researchers to document these languages, but also encouraging speakers to appreciate their own linguistic heritage. At the same time, by creating a permanent monument of your language, you can help speakers achieve recognition of their identity by people outside their speech community,” said Professor Sitaridou, who has been studying Romeyka for the last 16 years.
The innovative tool is designed by a Harvard Computer Science graduate, Mr. Matthew Nazari, who also speaks Aramaic. Together they hope that this new tool will also pave the way for the production of linguistic materials in a naturalistic learning environment outside the classroom, but based on everyday use, orality and community.
Coinciding with the launch of the platform, Sitaridou is revealing important new findings on language development and grammar at an exhibition in Greece (details below).
Sitaridou’s most important findings include the conclusion that Romeyka descends from Hellenistic Greek, not medieval Greek, which distinguishes it from other dialects of modern Greek. “Romeyka is the sister, rather than the daughter, of modern Greek,” said Sitaridou, a fellow of Queens’ College and professor of Spanish and historical linguistics at Cambridge’s Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics. “Basically, this analysis destabilizes the claim that Modern Greek is a language isolate.”
Over the past 150 years, only four field researchers have collected data on Romeyka in Trabzon. By engaging with local communities, particularly female speakers, Sitaridou has amassed the largest collection of monolingually collected audio and video data in existence, amounting to over 29 GB of ethically sourced data, and is the author of 21 peer-reviewed publications. A YouTube film about Sitaridou’s fieldwork has received 723,000 views to date.
Grammar and a new phylogeny of Greek
Sitaridou’s analysis of the Romeyka infinitive is key. All other Greek dialects known today have stopped using the infinitive found in Ancient Greek. This is what modern Greek speakers would say I want me to go rather I want to go. But, in Romeyka, the infinitive is still alive and Sitaridou has seen indisputable evidence that this ancient Greek infinitive can be traced back to Hellenistic Greek due to its preservation in a structure that became obsolete in early medieval times in all other Greek varieties, but which it continued to be used in Romeyka and at the same time undergo a translinguistically rare mutation to a negative element.
Sitaridou’s findings have significant implications for our understanding of the evolution of Greek, because they suggest that there is more than one Greek language on a par with the Romance languages (which are all derived from Vulgar Latin and not from each other).
Historical context and new field work sites.
The roots of the Greek presence in the Black Sea are full of myths: from the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis and the Amazons. But what we know is that the Greeks began to spread across the Black Sea in about the 6th century BC. The Ionians founded Miletus, which in turn founded Sinope, which eventually colonized Trebizond. In Pontus, the language of the first Greek colonizers of Trebizond was the Ionian Greek of Sinope.
in the 4th In the century BC, the passage of Alexander the Great’s army contributed to the creation of another Greek-speaking center, south of Pontus, in Cappadocia. It is possible that from Cappadocia Greek also spread northwards towards Pontus.
However, the decisive phase for the expansion of the Greek language seems to be Christianization. The inhabitants of Pontus were among the first converts and are mentioned in the New Testament. Soumela Monastery was founded in 386 AD, about 20 years after the region officially adopted Christianity. The fall of Trebizond to the Ottomans in 1461 led to the city becoming majority Muslim.
Professor Sitaridou said: “Conversion to Islam in Asia Minor was generally accompanied by a linguistic shift to Turkish, but communities in the valleys retained Romeyka. And because of Islamization, they retained some archaic features, while Greek-speaking communities “Those who remained Christians grew up closer to modern Greek, especially due to extensive schooling in Greek in the 19th and early 20th centuries.”
Recently, Prof. Sitaridou began work at a new site, Tonya, where no other fieldworker had reached, only to reveal significant grammatical variation between valleys, indicating a different onset of Islamization. In a forthcoming publication, it is argued that both the syntax of the subordination and negation systems in Tonya show different patterns and, therefore, a diachronic development of the Çaykara variety.
In 1923, under the Greco-Turkish population exchange, the Greek-speaking Christians of Pontus were forced to leave Turkey and move to Greece, while the Romeika-speaking Muslim communities in the Trabzon area remained in their homeland while professing Islam, which explains why this Greek variety is still spoken in small enclaves in the region. Since 1923 and until very recently, the two speech communities were unaware of the other’s existence.
Preservation of heritage languages and why it is important
Speakers are still reluctant to identify Romeika as one of their languages since, for Turkish nationalists, speaking Greek goes against the very foundations of belonging. From a Greek nationalist perspective, these varieties are considered “contaminated” and/or harmful to the ideology of a single Greek language spoken continuously since ancient times, as Sitaridou explains in an article that is about to be published by the Laz Institute in Istanbul. .
In Greece, Turkey and beyond, Sitaridou has used his research to raise awareness of Romeyka, stimulate language preservation efforts, and improve attitudes. In Greece, for example, Sitaridou co-introduced a pioneering new course on Pontic Greek at the Democritus University of Thrace, as the number of Pontic Greek speakers is also declining.
“Raising the status of minority and heritage languages is crucial for social cohesion, not only in this region, but around the world,” said Professor Sitaridou. “When speakers can speak their native languages they feel “seen” and therefore more connected to the rest of society; on the other hand, not speaking heritage or minority languages creates some type of trauma that actually undermines integration which linguistic assimilation is proud to achieve.”
The same spirit runs through a new AHRC-funded project on documenting a critically endangered language, Sri Lankan Portuguese, among black communities in northwest Sri Lanka. Sitaridou will document and analyze manjathe only remaining linguistic and cultural expression of African heritage for these communities.
Exhibition at Mohamed Ali’s historic house in Kavala this April
The Romeyka exhibition (http://www.romeyka.org/mohaexhibition/index-en.html) takes place at the MOHA Research Center in Kavala, Greece, from 29th 28th Marchth April 2024.
The exhibition features unpublished archival material from Exeter College, Oxford and photographic material from the British School of Athens that gives us an insight into the Greek-speaking communities and language on the southern shores of the Black Sea 110 years ago, taken by RM Dawkins , one of the first field workers in the area. This is combined with photographs and video material from Professor Sitaridou’s own fieldwork, interspersed with panels and audio material to communicate her linguistic findings.
The exhibition aims to generate further reflections on endangered heritages, fragmented and shared identities and collective memory, as well as help us better understand multilingualism, localized experiences, intergenerational stories of coexistence and displacement, diasporic selves and loss of languages, and alternatives. modalities of being and belonging in both Greece and Türkiye.