The Pontic Greek dialect preserved ancient Greek words lost in modern Greek. The 1923 population exchange erased 3,000 years of linguistic continuity, creating a diaspora that preserves archaic pronunciation and vocabulary in isolated communities.
Squeaks 41, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A linguistic time capsule
Along the mountainous southern coast of the Black Sea, a unique linguistic variant of Greek known as Pontic Greek, or Romeyka, is a direct link to the ancient Hellenistic world. Descended from the Ionic and later Koine Greek spoken by colonists in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, this language developed in relative isolation for nearly a millennium. After Seljuk Turk invasions in the 11th century AD cut the region of Pontus off from the rest of the Byzantine Empire, Romeyka evolved on a separate path from other Greek dialects.
This separation resulted in the preservation of archaic grammatical structures that have vanished from Standard Modern Greek. The most important of these is the infinitive verb form, a feature of Ancient Greek that disappeared from all other Modern Greek varieties by the early medieval period. For example, a Romeyka speaker would use an infinitive to say "I want to go," a construction structurally identical to Ancient Greek. In contrast, a speaker of Standard Modern Greek would say "I want that I go," using a finite subjunctive clause. This and other ancient features make Romeyka a subject of intense interest for historical linguists, as it provides shows the evolution of the Greek language.
The great upheaval
For thousands of years, a continuous Hellenic presence existed in the Pontus region. This ended in the early 20th century. Between 1914 and 1923, the Pontic Greek population became a target of systematic persecution by Ottoman and later Turkish nationalist governments. This campaign, known as the Pontic Greek genocide, involved massacres, forced deportations and death marches, resulting in an estimated 350,000 to 360,000 deaths.
The final act of this displacement was the 1923 Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed as part of the Treaty of Lausanne. This treaty mandated a compulsory population exchange based on religious identity. Approximately 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were expelled from Turkey to Greece, while around 400,000 Muslims were moved from Greece to Turkey. This event forcibly removed the vast majority of Pontic Greek speakers from their ancestral homeland, effectively extinguishing the language in the place where it had existed for nearly three millennia.
The language now faces extinction. UNESCO has classified Pontic Greek as "definitely endangered". In Turkey, small pockets of speakers remain, primarily in villages around Trabzon. These communities consist of descendants of Pontic Greeks who had converted to Islam and were therefore exempt from the 1923 exchange. Estimates suggest only a few thousand speakers remain in this region. This small population, isolated for a century, preserves a form of the language that is a record of linguistic history.
💡Fun Facts
Pontic Greek (Romeyka) is one of the only Modern Greek varieties to retain the infinitive verb form, a direct inheritance from Ancient Greek that was lost elsewhere.
The language is not entirely mutually intelligible with Standard Modern Greek due to its separate development since the 11th century.
The traditional instrument of Pontic culture is the Pontic lyra, also called a kemençe, a three-stringed bowed instrument.
The language survives in Turkey only because its remaining speakers are Muslims, who were exempt from the 1923 population exchange based on religion, not language.
