Pontian Greek Society of Chicago

Greek With No Models, History or Standard: Muslim Pontic Greek

Pietro Bortone

"In north-eastern Turkey, in the area known to the Greeks as Πόντος, there used to be a large, high-profile Greek community, which was forcibly expelled en masse in 1923 in the infamous ‘Exchange of Populations’ between Greece and Turkey.  It is less well known that there are still a few rather isolated villages in the eastern corner, in the Trabzon area, especially near Of, where the locals speak varieties of a ‘dialect’ that is in fact Greek – akin to the Pontic Greek dialects once spoken there by Greeks.  The speakers, of essentially Turkish and Muslim identity, descend in part from Greeks who converted to Islam over 300 years ago, developed a separate identity, came to be regarded as Turks, and were thus able to remain in the area to this day."*

Please click on link below to read entire article:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf0044/index_files/PietroBortone.pdf

From the book: "Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present."

Edited by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Silk, King's College London, UK

Copyright 2009 by Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Michael Silk

Published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road,

Farnham, Surrey GU9 7PT, UK.

 
Dr. Pietro Bortone graduated from King's College, University of London, with a First in Classical, Medieval and Modern Greek, and with the Ronald Burrow Studentship award. He then attained three postgraduate degrees at the University of Oxford: a Master's specializing in Linguistic Theory, a further Master's in Comparative Philology, and a Doctorate on semantic developments from ancient to contemporary Greek. Trained as a classicist, as a neohellenist, and as a linguist, his main area of research, teaching, translating and publication is Ancient, Byzantine and Modern Greek, with a general interest in Classics, in Theoretical Linguistics, and in Modern Greece and Turkey. May 2010 saw the release of his book Greek Prepositions. From Antiquity to the Present. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics & Mediterranean Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2003 to 2010. At present, he is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Uppsala, Sweden.

*Permission has been granted by the author to post link from pontiangreeks.org to article found on personal homepage.

Click here for English version  

Click here for Greek version

Created by The Pontian Greek Society of Chicago with the help of Ron Levitsky, a teacher at Sunset Ridge School in Northfield, Illinois, The Pontian Greek Genocide Teaching Unit introduces middle schooland high school students to the tragedy of the Pontian Greeks who were subjected to the first genocide of the 20th Century. Available to download in English and in Greek.

From 1914 to 1923, Christian minorities were forcibly expelled from their homes to comply with Turkish nationalist visions of an ethnically pure homeland inhabited only by Turks.  Villages, cities, and farmlands across Pontus were emptied and the inhabitants subjected to atrocities under carefullyconcealed orders by government and party officials until the population exchange of 1923.