A brand new information crowdsourcing platform goals to protect the sound of Romeyka, an endangered millennia-old number of Greek. Specialists contemplate the language to be a linguistic goldmine and a dwelling bridge to the traditional world.
The initiative, led by Professor Ioanna Sitaridou from the College of Cambridge, contributes to the UN’s Worldwide Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-32), which goals ‘to attract world consideration on the important scenario of many indigenous languages and to mobilise stakeholders and assets for his or her preservation, revitalization and promotion.’
Romeyka is assumed to have solely a few thousand native audio system left in Turkey’s Trabzon area, however the exact quantity is difficult to calculate particularly due to the truth that there’s additionally numerous heritage audio system within the diaspora and the continued language shift to Turkish.
Romeyka doesn’t have a writing system and has been transmitted solely orally. In depth contact with Turkish, the absence of help mechanisms to facilitate intergenerational transmission, socio-cultural stigma, and migration have all taken their toll on Romeyka. A excessive proportion of native audio system in Trabzon are over 65 years of age and fewer younger persons are studying the language.
The newly launched trilingual Crowdsourcing Romeyka platform ( invitations members of the general public from wherever on this planet to add audio recordings of Romeyka being spoken.
“Speech crowdsourcing is a brand new instrument which helps audio system construct a repository of spoken information for his or her endangered languages whereas permitting researchers to doc these languages, but in addition motivating audio system to understand their very own linguistic heritage. On the similar time, by making a everlasting monument of their language, it could assist audio system obtain acknowledgement of their id from individuals outdoors of their speech group,” mentioned Prof. Sitaridou, who has been finding out Romeyka for the final 16 years.
The modern instrument is designed by a Harvard undergraduate in Laptop Science, Mr Matthew Nazari, himself a heritage speaker of Aramaic. Collectively they hope that this new instrument can even pave the way in which for the manufacturing of language supplies in a naturalistic studying setting away from the classroom, however primarily based as a substitute round on a regular basis use, orality, and group.
To coincide with the platform’s launch, Sitaridou is unveiling main new findings in regards to the language’s improvement and grammar at an exhibition in Greece (particulars beneath).
Sitaridou’s most vital findings embody the conclusion that Romeyka descends from Hellenistic Greek not Medieval Greek, making it distinct from different Trendy Greek dialects. “Romeyka is a sister, relatively than a daughter, of Trendy Greek,” mentioned Sitaridou, a Fellow of Queens’ Faculty and Professor of Spanish and Historic Linguistics in Cambridge’s School of Trendy and Medieval Languages and Linguistics. “Primarily this evaluation unsettles the declare that Trendy Greek is an isolate language.”
Over the past 150 years, solely 4 fieldworkers have collected information on Romeyka in Trabzon. By partaking with native communities, significantly feminine audio system, Sitaridou has amassed the biggest assortment of audio and video information in existence collected monolingually and amounting to greater than 29GB of ethically sourced information, and has authored 21 peer-reviewed publications. A YouTube movie about Sitaridou’s fieldwork has obtained 723,000 views to-date.
Grammar and a brand new phylogeny for Greek
Sitaridou’s evaluation of the Romeyka infinitive is vital. All different Greek dialects recognized in the present day have stopped utilizing the infinitive present in historic Greek. So audio system of Trendy Greek would say I need that I am going as a substitute of I wish to go. However, in Romeyka, the infinitive lives on and Sitaridou has noticed uncontroversial proof that this Historic Greek infinitive will be dated again to Hellenistic Greek resulting from its preservation in a construction which turned out of date by early Mediaeval instances in all different Greek varieties, however continued for use in Romeyka whereas additionally present process a cross-linguistically uncommon mutation to a detrimental merchandise.
Sitaridou’s findings have vital implications for our understanding of the evolution of Greek, as a result of they counsel that there’s multiple Greek language on a par with the Romance languages (which all derived out of Vulgar Latin relatively than out of one another).
Historic context and new area work websites
The roots of the Greek presence within the Black Sea are steeped in fable: from the journey of Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis, to the Amazons. However what we all know is that the Greeks started to unfold across the Black Sea from roughly the sixth Century BCE. Ionians based Miletus, which, in flip, based Sinope, which, ultimately, colonized Trebizond. Within the Pontus, the language of the primary Greek colonizers of Trebizond was the Ionic Greek of Sinope.
Within the 4th Century BCE, the passage of Alexander the Nice’s military contributed to the creation of one other Greek-speaking centre, to the South of Pontus, at Cappadocia. It’s attainable that from Cappadocia, Greek could have additionally unfold northwards in the direction of Pontus.
Nonetheless, the decisive part for the enlargement of the Greek language appears to be Christianization. The inhabitants of Pontus had been among the many first converts and are talked about within the New Testomony. The Soumela monastery was based in 386 CE, round 20 years after the area formally adopted Christianity. The autumn of Trebizond to the Ottomans in 1461 led to the town changing into majority Muslim.
Prof. Sitaridou mentioned: “Conversion to Islam throughout Asia Minor was normally accompanied by a linguistic shift to Turkish, however communities within the valleys retained Romeyka. And due to Islamization, they retained some archaic options whereas the Greek-speaking communities who remained Christian grew nearer to Trendy Greek, particularly due to intensive education in Greek within the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
Not too long ago, Prof. Sitaridou began area working in a brand new web site, Tonya, the place no different area employee has ever reached, solely to disclose vital grammatical variation between the valleys indicating totally different Islamisation onset. In a publication, to look quickly, it’s argued that each the syntax of subordination and negation programs in Tonya present totally different patterns and thus diachronic improvement from the Çaykara selection.
In 1923, below the Greco-Turkish inhabitants alternate, Greek-speaking Christians of Pontus had been pressured to depart Turkey and relocate to Greece whereas Romeyka-speaking Muslim communities within the Trabzon space remained of their homeland as they professed Islam, explaining why this Greek selection continues to be spoken in small enclaves within the area. Since 1923 and till very not too long ago the 2 speech communities had been oblivious of one another’s existence.
Preservation of heritage languages and why it issues
Audio system are nonetheless reluctant to determine Romeyka as considered one of their languages since, for Turkish nationalists, talking Greek goes in opposition to the very fundamentals of 1’s belonging. From a Greek nationalist perspective, these varieties are deemed ‘contaminated’ and/or disruptive to the ideology of 1 single Greek language spoken uninterruptedly since antiquity, as Sitaridou explains in an article which is about to be revealed by the Laz Institute in Istanbul.
In Greece, Turkey and past, Sitaridou has used her analysis to boost consciousness of Romeyka, stimulate language preservation efforts and improve attitudes. In Greece, for example, Sitaridou co-introduced a pioneering new course on Pontic Greek on the Democritus College of Thrace because the variety of audio system of Pontic Greek can also be dwindling.
“Elevating the standing of minority and heritage languages is essential to social cohesion, not simply on this area, however everywhere in the world,” Prof. Sitaridou mentioned. “When audio system can communicate their house languages they really feel “seen” and thus they really feel extra linked to the remainder of the society; then again, not talking the heritage or minority languages creates some type of trauma which in actual fact undermines the combination which linguistic assimilation takes pleasure in attaining.”
The identical ethos traverses a brand new AHRC-funded undertaking in regards to the documentation of a critically endangered language, Sri Lanka Portuguese, amongst Afrodescent communities in north-western Sri Lanka. Sitaridou might be documenting and analysing manja, the one remaining linguistic and cultural expression of African heritage for these communities.
Exhibition at Mohamed Ali’s historic Home in Kavala this April
The Romeyka exhibition ( runs on the MOHA Analysis Centre in Kavala, Greece, from 29th March — 28th April 2024.
The exhibition options beforehand unpublished archival materials from Exeter Faculty, Oxford and photographic materials from British Faculty of Athens which give us a glimpse into the Greek-speaking communities and language within the southern Black Sea shores 110 years in the past taken by R.M. Dawkins, one of many first area employees within the space. That is mixed with pictures and video materials from Prof. Sitaridou’s personal fieldwork, interspersed with panels and audio materials to speak her linguistic findings.
The exhibition goals to generate additional reflections on endangered heritages, fragmented and shared identities and collective reminiscence in addition to serving to us get a greater grasp of multilingualism, localised experiences, intergenerational tales of co-existence and displacement, diasporic selves and language loss, and various modalities of being and belonging each in Greece and Turkey.
