The Last Romans: Romeyka and the Life and Death of a Greek Language in Anatolia
Ioanna Sitaridou (University of Cambridge)
For nearly 1,500 years, Greek was the dominant language of Anatolia, shaping the linguistic, cultural, and political landscape of a region where diverse populations gradually adopted Greek, embraced Christianity, and came to identify as Romans. Yet the history of Greek in Anatolia did not end with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, nor with the transformations that followed the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire. Today, in the mountainous Black Sea region of Turkey, a remarkable Greek variety known as Romeyka survives among communities who are Turkish citizens and Muslim. Its very name, meaning Romaic, preserves a linguistic designation deeply rooted in the Roman identity of the Eastern Roman Empire. Even more remarkably, Romeyka retains grammatical features lost in other Greek varieties, offering a unique window into earlier stages of Greek while also bearing witness to centuries of multilingualism and language contact.
Can a language transmitted exclusively through oral tradition reveal more than 2,000 years of linguistic evolution? How can an endangered language challenge what we thought we knew about the history of Greek—and even about linguistic theory itself? How do linguists reconstruct the past, and what can Romeyka teach us about how grammatical systems evolve over centuries? And how has this language survived despite profound religious, political, and linguistic transformations? Drawing on nearly two decades of pioneering fieldwork with Romeyka-speaking communities, this lecture explores these questions while illuminating the complex relationships between language, history, religion, and identity. It also confronts an urgent challenge: What happens when a language that has survived for centuries now faces the possibility of extinction?
Through the voices of its speakers, we will discover why Romeyka matters not only for reconstructing the past and rethinking theories of language change, but also for safeguarding the linguistic and cultural diversity of our present.
About the Speaker:
Ioanna Sitaridou is Professor of Spanish and Historical Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago (Fall 2026), and President-Elect of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (2026–2029). She is also Co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies and a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. She has published extensively on Greek and the Ibero-Romance languages, specialising in historical syntax, language contact, variation, and change. Her research challenges established assumptions about syntactic change and contact, combining linguistic theory with rigorous fieldwork and sociohistorical reconstruction. For nearly two decades, she has conducted pioneering research on Romeyka, an endangered Greek variety spoken in the Black Sea region of Turkey. Her discoveries have shed new light on the history of Greek, revealing remarkable instances of linguistic continuity and innovation. Her wider research encompasses endangered and marginalised languages, including Llanito in Gibraltar, Afro-Portuguese in Sri Lanka, Romani and Vlach in Greece, combining theoretical inquiry with a commitment to community-centred language documentation and revitalisation.
