A (Contact-)Grammar of Romeyka
Authors:   , Schreiber Laurentia 
Published: May 2024

The present thesis is the first thorough grammatical description of Romeyka, i.e., the Muslim variety of Pontic Greek still spoken in the indigenous setting in Trabzon province in north-eastern Turkey. While the language of the Christian speech communities of Pontus has been featured in earlier research during the last hundred years – both in Pontus prior to the population exchange in 1923, and after that in Greece –, less research is available on the variety of Pontic Greek as spoken by Muslims in the area at present. As an unrecognized minority language in a Turkish-dominant majority society and due to ambivalent attitudes and identificational links of the speakers towards their language, Romeyka is currently undergoing language shift to Turkish. While the language has been in contact with Turkish for several hundred years – which arguably resulted in a number of lexical and structural contact influences albeit without leading to a mixed acrolect –, the influence of Turkish on domains where traditionally Romeyka used to be spoken has grown following labour migration from the Black Sea area to larger cities in western Turkey since the 1960s posing now – dependent upon the speech community – a threat to the vitality of Romeyka. On the other hand, Pontic Greek – and in particular the Muslim variety – is known to be a conservative representative of Asia Minor Greek preserving archaisms dating back via Hellenistic and Medieval Greek to Ancient Greek, among them so notorious grammatical features as the Romeyka infinitive, but also complex negators and pronominal forms. It is the aim of the present thesis to describe the synchronic grammar of Romeyka as currently spoken especially by elderly speakers in the Of valley, whose variety can be considered the most archaic. As a basis for profound grammatical research – and as a contribution towards language description and documentation at the same time –, a spoken language corpus has been compiled from the variety Romeyka of Of as spoken in Çaykara based on recordings of naturalistic oral texts produced by ten speakers mainly during fieldwork in the area in 2019. In order to contribute to further scholarly research, the corpus has been transcribed, translated and fully grammatically annotated and will be made publicly available upon the publication of the thesis. In the light of the ongoing language shift in Romeyka, the present thesis focuses on the actual use of the language by bilingual – and most often Turkish dominant – speakers. In order to disentangle the factors that led to the present grammatical shape of Romeyka, three research questions targeting potential causes for the grammatical developments have been considered: (I.) How strong is the Turkish influence on the grammar of Romeyka? (II.) Does the setting of Romeyka as a minority language in a Turkish-dominant society, namely the process of language shift, play a role in grammatical change? (III.) How persistent are the inherited Greek features and what is the role of language-internal changes? However, since the primary aim of the present thesis is the description and presentation of linguistic structures forming potential candidates for an ongoing language change compared to earlier varieties of Greek and to closely related varieties of Asia Minor Greek, the theoretical questions can only tentatively be answered at the present stage of research. It can be nevertheless stated that Romeyka seems to have preserved its Greek core with a Greek basic lexicon, albeit with considerable lexical influences from Turkish in both content and functional word classes, but probably to a lesser extent compared to its close relative Cappadocian. Furthermore, Romeyka appears to preserve indeed a number of archaic features as well as certain particularities of Pontic such as a complex system of spatial deixis. On the other hand, there are considerable Turkish influences on the structural domain such as for example in progressives, verb serialization, adjunct and relative clauses and clause combination, that have evolved under long-time contact and appear consistently across different speakers. In addition, certain contact-induced structural features especially at the syntactic domain have been found to be sensitive to the bilingual profile of the individual speaker, i.e., among others, the dominant language, namely the borrowing of the Turkish question particle mI, OV word orders in declarative clauses, and an increase in non-finite complementation strategies. This finding led to the assumption that – apart from long-term contact-induced changes which seem not to impair the grammatical integrity of Romeyka – language shift is a matter of individual multilingual speaker profiles with different degrees of Turkish dominance in both language competence and use. Finally, it is argued that the specific communicative setting in which Romeyka is spoken, and which determines the communicative practice of the speakers, is decisive to set the pragmatic frame for the language(s) used: in Turkish-dominant settings, speakers tend to be more inclined to apply multiple forms of code-switching and show stronger influences of Turkish structures.