Pontic Greek

Name

Historically the speakers of Pontic Greek called it Romeyka (Romeika, Greek: Ρωμαίικα), which, in a more general sense, is also a historical and colloquial term for Modern Greek as a whole. The term "Pontic" originated in scholarly usage, but it has been adopted as a mark of identity by Pontic Greeks living in Greece.

Similarly, in Turkish, the language is called Rumca (pronounced [ˈɾumd͡ʒa]), derived from the Turkish word Rum, denoting ethnic Greeks living in Turkey in general; the term also comprises other Greek speakers in Turkey such as those from Istanbul or Imbros (Gökçeada) who speak a language close to Standard Modern Greek.

Today's Pontic speakers living in Turkey call their language Romeyka, Rumca or Rumcika.

Dialects

Greek linguist Manolis Triantafyllidis has divided the Pontic of Turkey into two groups:

Speakers of Chaldiot were the most numerous. In phonology, some varieties of Pontic are reported to demonstrate vowel harmony, a well-known feature of Turkish (Mirambel 1965).

Outside Turkey one can distinguish:

Ophitic

The inhabitants of the Of valley who had converted to Islam in the 17th century remained in Turkey and have partly retained the Pontic language until today. Their dialect, which forms part of the Trapezountiac subgroup, is called "Ophitic" by linguists, but speakers generally call it Romeyka. As few as 5,000 people are reported to speak it. There are however estimates that show the real number of the speakers as considerably higher.

Ophitic has retained the infinitive, which is present in Ancient Greek but has been lost in other variants of Modern Greek; it has therefore been characterized as "archaic" (even in relation to other Pontic dialects) and as the living language that is closest to Ancient Greek.

A very similar dialect is spoken by descendants of Christians from the Of valley now living in Greece in the village of Nea Trapezounta, Pieria, (Central Macedonia), with about 400 speakers.

Geographic distribution

Though Pontic was originally spoken on the southern shores of the Black Sea, substantial numbers migrated into the northern and eastern shores, into the Russian Empire of the 18th and 19th century. Pontic is still spoken by large numbers of people in Ukraine: mainly Mariupol, but also other places in Ukraine such as Odessa and Donetsk, Russia (around Stavropol) and Georgia. The language enjoyed some use as a literary medium in the 1930s, including a school grammar (Topkhara 1998 [1932]).

After the massacres of the 1910s, the majority of speakers remaining in Asia Minor were subject to the Treaty of Lausanne population exchange, and were resettled in Greece (mainly northern Greece). A second wave of migration occurred in the early 1990s, this time from the former Soviet Union.

In Greece, Pontic is now used mainly emblematically rather than as a medium of communication.

Greece

In Greece, Pontic has no official status. Pontic Greeks expelled from their homeland and arriving in Greece in 1923 were encouraged to assimilate and give up their separate identity.

Soviet Union

Historically, Pontic Greek was the de facto language of the Greek minority in the USSR, although in the Πανσυνδεσμιακή Σύσκεψη (All-Union Conference) of 1926, organized by the Greek-Soviet intelligentsia, it was decided that demotic should be the official language of the community.

In the 1920s, the early Bolsheviks actively encouraged a Rumaiic/Pontic Greek revival among ethnic Greeks in The Soviet Union. Promoting the Rumaiic, as against the Demotic Greek of Greece, was in effect a way of promoting a separate identity and drawing Soviet Greeks further away from the influence of capitalist Greece. The Soviet administration established a Greek-Rumaiic theater, several magazines and newspapers and a number of Rumaiic language schools. The Rumaiic poet Georgi Kostoprav created a Rumaiic poetic language for his work.

The policy underwent a sharp reversal in 1937. At the time of the Moscow Trials and the purges targeting various groups and individuals who aroused Joseph Stalin's often baseless suspicions, policies towards ethnic Greeks became unequivocally harsh and hostile. Kostoprav and many other Rumaiics were killed, and a large percentage of the population was detained and transported to Gulags or deported to remote parts of the Soviet Union.

Later revival of Greek identity in the Soviet Union and post-Communist Russia saw a renewed division on the issue of Rumaiic versus Demotic. A new attempt to preserve a sense of ethnic Rumaiic identity started in the mid-1980s. The Ukrainian scholar Andriy Biletsky created a new Slavonic alphabet, but though a number of writers and poets make use of this alphabet, the population of the region rarely uses it.

Culture

The language has a rich oral tradition and folklore and Pontic songs are particularly popular in Greece. There is also some limited production of modern literature in Pontic, including poetry collections (among the most renowned writers is Kostas Diamantidis), novels, and translated Asterix comic albums.

Pontic alphabets

Pontic in Greece is written in historical Greek orthography, with diacritics: σ̌ ζ̌ ξ̌ ψ̌ for /ʃ ʒ kʃ pʃ/, α̈ ο̈ for [æ ø] (phonological /ia io/). Pontic in Turkey is written in Latin script following Turkish conventions, and Pontic in Russia is written in Cyrillic. In early Soviet times, Pontic was written in the Greek script phonetically, as shown below, using digraphs instead of diacritics; [æ ø] were written out as ια, ιο.

Archaisms

Comparison with Ancient Greek

ράψεινε, κράξεινε, μεθύσεινε, καλέσεινε, λαλήσεινε, κτυπήσεινε, καθίσεινε