Romeyka, a relative of the Modern Greek language, has a shrinking population of speakers in Turkey, but a helping hand from scholars and the general public may help it survive.
Thousands of languages all over the world face an uncertain future and may soon fade away if immediate action isn’t taken. One of these endangered languages is Romeyka, a variety of Greek that has roots in the ancient Hellenistic age.
“Speech crowdsourcing is a new tool which helps speakers build a repository of spoken data for their endangered languages while allowing researchers to document these languages, but also motivating speakers to appreciate their own linguistic heritage,” said SitaridouAlong with the platform’s launch, Sitaridou is presenting new findings about the language’s development and grammar at an exhibition in Greece.
A distinct feature of Romeyka is that it uses the infinitive, while all other Greek dialects known today do not. For example, Modern Greek speakers would say “” The infinitive originally appeared in Hellenistic Greek , but became obsolete in Medieval times as all Greek varieties except for Romeyka ditched it.
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