̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Ioanna Sitaridou

Last chance to record archaic Greek language ‘heading for extinction’

ta385 — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 06:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��initiative, led by Professor Ioanna Sitaridou (Queens' College and Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics), contributes to the UN’s International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-32), which aims ‘to draw global attention on the critical situation of many indigenous languages and to mobilise stakeholders and resources for their preservation, revitalization and promotion.’

Romeyka is thought to have only a couple of thousand native speakers left in Turkey’s Trabzon region, but the precise number is hard to calculate especially because of the fact that there are also a large number of heritage speakers in the diaspora and the ongoing language shift to Turkish.

Romeyka does not have a writing system and has been transmitted only orally. Extensive contact with Turkish, the absence of support mechanisms to facilitate intergenerational transmission, socio-cultural stigma, and migration have all taken their toll on Romeyka. A high proportion of native speakers in Trabzon are over 65 years of age and fewer young people are learning the language.

̽��ֱ��newly launched trilingual Crowdsourcing Romeyka platform invites members of the public from anywhere in the world to upload audio recordings of Romeyka being spoken.

“Speech crowdsourcing is a new tool which helps speakers build a repository of spoken data for their endangered languages while allowing researchers to document these languages, but also motivating speakers to appreciate their own linguistic heritage. At the same time, by creating a permanent monument of their language, it can help speakers achieve acknowledgement of their identity from people outside of their speech community,” said Professor Sitaridou, who has been studying Romeyka for the last 16 years.

̽��ֱ��innovative tool is designed by a Harvard undergraduate in Computer Science, Mr Matthew Nazari, himself a heritage speaker of Aramaic. Together they hope that this new tool will also pave the way for the production of language materials in a naturalistic learning environment away from the classroom, but based instead around everyday use, orality, and community.

To coincide with the platform’s launch, Sitaridou is unveiling major new findings about the language’s 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, making it distinct from other Modern Greek dialects. “Romeyka is a sister, rather than a daughter, of Modern Greek,” said Sitaridou, Professor of Spanish and Historical Linguistics. “Essentially this analysis unsettles the claim that Modern Greek is an isolate language”.

Over the last 150 years, only four fieldworkers have collected data on Romeyka in Trabzon. By engaging with local communities, particularly female speakers, Sitaridou has amassed the largest collection of audio and video data in existence collected monolingually and amounting to more than 29GB of ethically sourced data, and has authored 21 peer-reviewed publications. A YouTube film about Sitaridou’s fieldwork has received 723,000 views to-date.

Grammar and a new phylogeny for 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. So speakers of Modern Greek would say I want that I go instead of I want to go. But, in Romeyka, the infinitive lives on and Sitaridou has observed uncontroversial proof that this Ancient Greek infinitive can be dated back to Hellenistic Greek due to its preservation in a structure which became obsolete by early Mediaeval times in all other Greek varieties, but continued to be used in Romeyka while also undergoing a cross-linguistically rare mutation to a negative item.

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 all derived out of Vulgar Latin rather than out of each other).

Historical context and new field work sites

̽��ֱ��roots of the Greek presence in the Black Sea are steeped in myth: from the journey of Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis, to the Amazons. But what we know is that the Greeks began to spread around the Black Sea from approximately the 6th Century BCE. Ionians founded Miletus, which, in turn, founded Sinope, which, eventually, colonized Trebizond. In the Pontus, the language of the first Greek colonizers of Trebizond was the Ionic Greek of Sinope.

In the 4th Century BCE, the passage of Alexander the Great’s army contributed to the creation of another Greek-speaking centre, to the South of Pontus, at Cappadocia. It is possible that from Cappadocia, Greek may have also spread northwards towards Pontus.

However, the decisive phase for the expansion of the Greek language seems to be Christianization. ̽��ֱ��inhabitants of Pontus were among the first converts and are mentioned in the New Testament. ̽��ֱ��Soumela monastery was founded in 386 CE, around 20 years after the region officially adopted Christianity. ̽��ֱ��fall of Trebizond to the Ottomans in 1461 led to the city becoming majority Muslim.

Professor Sitaridou said: “Conversion to Islam across Asia Minor was usually accompanied by a linguistic shift to Turkish, but communities in the valleys retained Romeyka. And because of Islamisation, they retained some archaic features while the Greek-speaking communities who remained Christian grew closer to Modern Greek, especially because of extensive schooling in Greek in the 19th and early 20th centuries.”

Recently, Professor Sitaridou started field working in a new site, Tonya, where no other field worker has ever reached, only to reveal significant grammatical variation between the valleys indicating different Islamisation onset. In a publication to appear soon, it is argued that both the syntax of subordination and negation systems in Tonya show different patterns and thus diachronic development from the Çaykara variety.

In 1923, under the Greco-Turkish population exchange, Greek-speaking Christians of Pontus were forced to leave Turkey and relocate to Greece while Romeyka-speaking Muslim communities in the Trabzon area remained in their homeland as they professed Islam, explaining why this Greek variety is still spoken in small enclaves in the region. Since 1923 and until very recently the two speech communities were oblivious of each other’s existence.

Preservation of heritage languages and why it matters

Speakers are still reluctant to identify Romeyka as one of their languages since, for Turkish nationalists, speaking Greek goes against the very fundamentals of one’s belonging. From a Greek nationalist perspective, these varieties are deemed ‘contaminated’ and/or disruptive to the ideology of one single Greek language spoken uninterruptedly since antiquity, as Sitaridou explains in an article which is about to be published by the Laz Institute in Istanbul.

In Greece, Turkey and beyond, Sitaridou has used her research to raise awareness of Romeyka, stimulate language preservation efforts and enhance attitudes. In Greece, for instance, Sitaridou co-introduced a pioneering new course on Pontic Greek at the Democritus ̽��ֱ�� of Thrace since the number of speakers of Pontic Greek is also dwindling.

“Raising the status of minority and heritage languages is crucial to social cohesion, not just in this region, but all over the world,” Professor Sitaridou said. “When speakers can speak their home languages they feel 'seen' and thus they feel more connected to the rest of the society; on the other hand, not speaking the heritage or minority languages creates some form of trauma which in fact undermines the integration which linguistic assimilation takes pride in achieving”.

̽��ֱ��same ethos traverses a new AHRC-funded project about the documentation of a critically endangered language, Sri Lanka Portuguese, among Afrodescent communities in north-western Sri Lanka. Sitaridou will be documenting and analysing manja, the only remaining linguistic and cultural expression of African heritage for these communities.

A Romeyka speaker's view

It is rare for Romeyka speakers to discuss their language publicly. Reflecting on her interactions with Professor Sitaridou, one such speaker, Mrs Havva Sarı, said:

“For me, it is very sad that the Romeyka language is lost, and it is also sad that young people do not speak it. We can only express ourselves with this language. Our jokes, our cries, and our folk songs are all in the Romeyka language. I raised my children in this language because I did not have another language. I would love for them to teach this language to their children, but everyone goes to the cities. They settled down and married people from different cultures. My children's children cannot speak the Romeyka language anymore, which makes me very sad.”

“I was very happy that there was someone from a different country who showed interest in the Romeyka language. It means that our language is very valuable. Ioanna, who did this research, communicated with me in the same language. I love her like a daughter.”

Exhibition at Mohamed Ali’s historical House in Kavala

̽��ֱ��Romeyka exhibition runs at the MOHA Research Centre in Kavala, Greece, from 29 March to 28 April 2024.

̽��ֱ��exhibition features previously unpublished archival material from Exeter College, Oxford and photographic material from British School of Athens which give us a glimpse into the Greek-speaking communities and language in the southern Black Sea shores 110 years ago taken by R M 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.

̽��ֱ��exhibition aims to generate further reflections on endangered heritages, fragmented and shared identities and collective memory as well as helping us get a better grasp of multilingualism, localised experiences, intergenerational stories of co-existence and displacement, diasporic selves and language loss, and alternative modalities of being and belonging both in Greece and Turkey.

A new data crowdsourcing platform aims to preserve the sound of Romeyka, an endangered millennia-old variety of Greek. Experts consider the language to be a linguistic goldmine and a living bridge to the ancient world.

Raising the status of minority and heritage languages is crucial to social cohesion, not just in this region, but all over the world

Professor Ioanna Sitaridou

Professor Ioanna Sitaridou (right) with a 100 year-old Romeyka speaker in Turkey's Trabzon region.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Against all odds: archaic Greek in a modern world

bjb42 — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Until Medieval times, the area of Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast of Turkey, lay at the heart of the Greek-speaking world. ̽��ֱ��land of the legendary Amazon kingdom was colonised by the Greeks in the 8th and 7th centuries BC and was immortalised in Greek mythology as the area from which Jason and his crew of 50 Argonauts began their journey across the Black Sea on his quest for the Golden Fleece.

Remarkably, despite millennia of change in the cultural and socio-political history of the surrounding area, in this mountainous and isolated north-east corner of Asia Minor its people still speak Greek. ̽��ֱ��uniqueness of the dialect – known as Romeyka – is providing a fascinating window on language past and present, as Dr Ioanna Sitaridou, ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer in Romance Philology at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Fellow and Director of Studies in Linguistics at Queens’ College, is discovering.

On the verge of extinction

Romeyka is proving a linguistic goldmine for research because of the startling number of archaic features it shares with the Koiné (common) Greek of Hellenistic and Roman times, spoken at the height of Greek influence across Asia Minor from the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD.

‘Although Romeyka can hardly be described as anything but a Modern Greek dialect,’ explains Dr Sitaridou, ‘it 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.’

As devout Muslims, Romeyka speakers in the Trabzon area were exempt from the large-scale population exchange between Greece and Turkey following the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Using religion as the defining criterion to re-settle Christians in Greece and Muslims in Turkey, the Treaty resulted in the exchange of some two million people between the two countries. For Pontus, the result was an exodus of Greek-speaking Christians, leaving small enclaves of Greek-speaking Muslims in Turkey.

Repeated waves of emigration from Trabzon, coupled with the influence of the dominant Turkish-speaking majority, have left the dialect vulnerable to extinction (UNESCO have designated Pontic Greek as ‘definitely endangered’). ‘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,’ says Dr Sitaridou. ‘With its demise would go an unparalleled opportunity to unlock how the Greek language has evolved. ’

Language cartography

Dr Sitaridou’s research project is uncovering the secrets of this little-studied dialect. Her expertise is both in syntax, which is the study of a language’s grammatical rules and sentence structure, and in how and why language changes. ‘With Romeyka, I have the most wonderful opportunity to study these two things in tandem. Not only does the dialect demonstrate elements that are proving problematic for the current linguistic theory but it also presents us with a living example of an evolving language.’

In collaboration with Professor Peter Mackridge ( ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford), who has carried out pioneering research on Pontic dialects since the 1980s, Dr Sitaridou is also working with Dr Hakan Özkan ( ̽��ֱ�� of Münster), Professor Stavroula Tsiplakou (Open ̽��ֱ�� of Cyprus), the European Dialect Syntax network (Meertens Institute) and three postgraduate students: Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Petros Karatsareas and Dimitrios Michelioudakis.

At the core of her work are fieldtrips to villages in Pontus to map the cartography of the language – how it works, how much micro-variation there exists (known as synchrony) and how the morpho-syntactic structure has changed through time (diachrony). Information is gathered through video and audio recordings of the villagers telling stories, as well as through specially structured questionnaires that Dr Sitaridou has designed to collect the complex data needed for unpicking the structure of a language.

Window on the past

Studying language change is, in general, notoriously difficult because of the lack of living speakers who can positively tell us what they think is ungrammatical or not (in contrast to texts, from which we can only recover what is grammatical). Investigating the history of Greek is no different despite the plethora of old texts.

‘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,’ says Dr Sitaridou, who is also a member of the Cambridge Group for Endangered Languages and Cultures (CELC).

Last of the infinitives

̽��ֱ��first results of the study are already providing remarkable insights, as Dr Sitaridou announced during the first ever linguistics conference on Romeyka last March at Queens’ College, Cambridge: ‘Unlike ancient forms of Greek, use of the infinitive has been lost in all other Greek dialects known today – so speakers of Modern Greek would sayI want that I goinstead ofI want to go. But, in Romeyka, not only is the infinitive preserved, making this essentially the last Greek infinitive of the Greek-speaking world, but we also find quirky infinitival constructions that have never been observed before – only perhaps in the Romance languages are there parallel constructions.’

All the more astonishing, the results so far seem to be indicating that Romeyka is closer to Hellenistic Koiné than all other Modern Greek dialects, which are generally considered to have emerged from the later Medieval Greek spoken in the 7th to the 13th century AD.

Change ‘in real time’

Dr Sitaridou’s research is ultimately trying to pinpoint how Pontic Greek evolved. ‘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,’ says Dr Sitaridou. ‘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. Or whether it developed from an earlier version of Greek in contrast to the rest of the Greek dialects and as a result of this more direct lineage, as well as its isolation from other dialects for centuries, it maintains archaic features.’

Nevertheless, Romeyka also demonstrates considerable innovation especially as a result of contact with Turkish. In this respect, Dr Sitaridou is interested in modelling what influence the contact with Turkish and Caucasian languages has had on the evolution of the dialect. Given the linguistic and socio-historic context of Romeyka, she notes that ‘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.’ It is precisely these questions she will pursue further as the recipient of the prestigious Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellowship in Hellenic Studies at Princeton ̽��ֱ�� in Spring term 2011.

̽��ֱ��implications of such research are, however, far more pervasive, since understanding how language functions could provide some insight into cultural identity and people’s sense of themselves, as well as what happens when cultures connect.

Dr Sitaridou, whose own great-grandparents were from the region, believes that the linguistic evidence will help to unravel the thread of language evolution; we have yet to see whether the thread takes us all the way back to the time of Jason and the Argonauts and whether more surprises await us.

For more information, please contact Dr Ioanna Sitaridou (is269@cam.ac.uk; http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/is269).

An endangered Greek dialect spoken in Turkey has been identified by Dr Ioanna Sitaridou as a "linguistic goldmine" because of its closeness to a language spoken 2,000 years ago.

Although Romeyka can hardly be described as anything but a Modern Greek dialect, it 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. 

Dr Ioanna Sitaridou

Archaic Greek in a modern world

Dr Ioanna Sitaridou

Trabzon area of Turkey

Cambridge Group for Endangered Languages and Cultures

Linguists and anthropologists from across Cambridge have created Cambridge Group for Endangered Languages and Cultures (CELC) as a forum for researchers with common interests not just in seeking to document languages that are under threat, but also the literatures and ideas about cultural identity that they help to maintain. For more information, please visit http://groups.pwf.cam.ac.uk/celc/

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