Romeyka descended from ancient Greek but may die out as it has no written form and is spoken by only a few thousand people
Prof Ioanna Sitaridou, left, has launched a crowdsourcing tool to recording Romeyka’s linguistic structures before it is too late.Prof Ioanna Sitaridou, left, has launched a crowdsourcing tool to recording Romeyka’s linguistic structures before it is too late.
With its remaining speakers ageing, the dialect is now threatened with extinction, leading a University of Cambridge academic to launch a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to record its unique linguistic structures before it is too late.project invites native speakers across the world to upload a recording of themselves talking in the language.
An example is the infinitive form of the verb, which in Romeyka still uses the form found in Ancient Greek. So while speakers of Modern Greek would say “I want that I go”, Romeyka preserves the ancient form “I want to go”. This structure had become obsolete in all other Greek varieties by early medieval times.
Though the history of the Greek presence in the Black Sea is not always easy to disentangle from legend, the Greek language expanded with the spread of Christianity. “Conversion to Islam across Asia Minor was usually accompanied by a linguistic shift to Turkish, but communities in the valleys retained Romeyka,” Sitaridou said.
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