page_title: Cappadocian Greek
section_title: History and research
hierarchical_section_title: Cappadocian Greek / History and research
caption_attribution_description: English: The region in green represents the ancient homeland of the Cappadocian Greek people. They lived in the historical region of Cappadocia until the early 20th century.
context_page_description: Cappadocian, also known as Cappadocian Greek or Asia Minor Greek, is a mixed language spoken in Cappadocia. The language originally diverged from the Medieval Greek of the Byzantine Empire following the Seljuq Turk victory at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. As a result of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s, all Cappadocian Greeks were forced to emigrate to Greece where they were resettled in various locations, primarily to Central and Northern Greece. The Cappadocians rapidly shifted to Standard Modern Greek and their language was thought to be extinct since the 1960s. In June 2005, Mark Janse and Dimitris Papazachariou discovered Cappadocians in Central and Northern Greece who could still speak their ancestral language fluently. Many are middle-aged, third-generation speakers who take a very positive attitude towards the language, as opposed to their parents and grandparents. The latter are much less inclined to speak Cappadocian and more often than not switch to Standard Modern Greek.
context_section_description: By the fifth century AD, the last of the Indo-European native languages of Asia Minor ceased to be spoken, replaced by Koine Greek. At the same time, the communities of central Asia Minor were becoming actively involved in the affairs of the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire, and some (now Greek-speaking) Cappadocians, such as Maurice Tiberius (r. 582–602) and Heraclius (r. 610 to 641), would even rise to become emperors.
  Cappadocian Greek first began to diverge from the Medieval Greek common language of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire six centuries later, following the Byzantine's defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. This defeat allowed Turkish speakers to enter Asia Minor for the first time, severing Cappadocia from the rest of the Byzantine world. By the 20th century Cappadocian Greek would come to be heavily influenced by Turkish, but unlike Standard Modern Greek, it would not be influenced by Venetian and French from the Frankokratia period, which followed the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204.
  The earliest records of the language are in the macaronic poems of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273), who lived in Iconium (Konya), and some ghazals by his son Sultan Walad. Interpretation of the Greek language texts is difficult as they are written in Arabic script, and in Rumi's case without vowel points; Dedes' edition (Δέδες) is the most recent edition.
  By the early 20th century many Cappadocians had shifted to Turkish altogether (written with the Greek alphabet, Karamanlidika). Where Greek was maintained (numerous villages near Kayseri, including Misthi, Malakopea, Prokopion, Karvali, and Anakou), it became heavily influenced by the surrounding Turkish. However, there are next to no written documents in Medieval or early Modern Cappadocian, as the language was, and still essentially is, a spoken language only. Those educated to read and write, such as priests, would do so in the more classicising literary Greek. The earliest outside studies of spoken Cappadocian date from the 19th century, but are generally not very accurate.
  One of the first documented studies was Modern Greek in Asia Minor: A study of dialect of Silly, Cappadocia and Pharasa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), by Richard MacGillivray Dawkins (1871–1955), the first Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, based on fieldwork conducted by the author in Cappadocia in 1909–1911.
  After the population exchange, several Cappadocian dialects have been described by collaborators of the Center for Asia Minor Studies (Κέντρον Μικρασιατικών Σπουδών) in Athens: Uluağaç (I.I. Kesisoglou, 1951), Aravan (D. Phosteris & I.I. Kesisoglou, 1960), Axo (G. Mavrochalyvidis & I.I. Kesisoglou, 1960) and Anaku (A.P. Costakis, 1964), resulting in a series of grammars (although regrettably not all Cappadocian villages were covered).
  In recent years, the study of Cappadocian has seen a revival following the pioneering work on Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) by Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, and a series of publications on various aspects of Cappadocian linguistics by Mark Janse, professor at Roosevelt Academy, who has also contributed a grammatical survey of Cappadocian to a forthcoming handbook on Modern Greek dialects edited by Christos Tzitzilis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki).
  The recent discovery of Cappadocian speakers by Janse and Papazachariou will result in the release of a new dictionary and a compilation of texts.
  Cappadocian Greek is well known from the linguistic literature as being one of the first well documented cases of language death, and in particular the significant admixture of non-Indo-European linguistic features into an Indo-European language. This process was pronounced in southwestern Cappadocia, and included the introduction of vowel harmony and verb-final word order.
caption: Original Cappadocian homeland
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