The exact number of people who speak Romani is difficult to say. It is not in written form, but has survived orally in the mountain villages around Trebizond, near the Black Sea coast.
As its remaining speakers age, the dialect is now threatened with extinction, leading a Cambridge University academic to launch a ‘last-chance’ crowdsourcing tool to capture its unique linguistic structures before it’s too late.
The “Crowdsourcing Romeyka” project invites native speakers around the world to upload a recording of them speaking the dialect. Joanna Sitaridou, professor of Spanish and historical linguistics, said she expected many were likely to be in the US and Australia, as well as spread across Europe.
“There is a very significant diaspora that is separated by religion and ethnic identity [από τις κοινότητες στην Τουρκία]but still shares so much,” she said.
Ioanna Sitaridou has established that rather than having developed from modern Greek, the Roman dialect is descended from the Hellenistic form of the language spoken in the centuries before Christ and shares some key features with ancient Greek.
An example is the infinitive form of the verb, which in Roman still uses the form found in Ancient Greek. Thus, while Modern Greek speakers used to say “I want to go”, Romani retains the ancient form “I want to go”. This structure had become obsolete in all other Greek varieties by early medieval times.
Ioanna Sitaridou concluded that “Romance is a sister, rather than a daughter, of Modern Greek,” a finding she says disrupts the claim that Modern Greek is an “isolated” language and unrelated to any other European language.
The Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 saw Turkey and Greece exchange their Christian and Muslim populations, but because the Romani-speaking communities in the Trebizond area are Muslim, they remained in their homeland.
As a result of extensive contact with Turkish, cultural stigmatization and immigration, however, the language is now at risk, according to Ms. Sitaridou. A high percentage of native speakers in the region are over 65 and fewer young people are learning the language.
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