Last chance to record archaic Greek language ‘heading for extinction’
Queens' College Fellow Prof. Ioanna Sitaridou leads an initiative to preserve the sound of Romeyka, an endangered millennia-old variety of Greek, thought to now only be spoken by a few thousand people.
Experts consider the language of Romeyka to be a linguistic goldmine and a living bridge to the ancient world. Professor Ioanna Sitaridou, Queens' Fellow and Professor of Spanish and Historical Linguistics in Cambridge’s MML department, contributes to the UN’s International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022-32).
As part of the initiative, a newly launched trilingual Crowdsourcing Romeyka platform invites members of the public from anywhere in the world to upload audio recordings of Romeyka being spoken.
Professor Ioanna Sitaridou (right) with a 100 years-old Romeyka speaker in Turkey's Trabzon region. © Professor Ioanna Sitaridou
Professor Ioanna Sitaridou (right) with a 100 years-old Romeyka speaker in Turkey's Trabzon region. © Professor Ioanna Sitaridou
Native speakers of Romeyka can be found in Turkey’s Trabzon region, but the precise number is hard to calculate, especially because of the fact that there is also a large number of heritage speakers in the diaspora and the ongoing language shift to Turkish.
With the ageing population of its remaining speakers, fewer young people are learning the language, leading to the critical need to preserve the language and the creation of the new Romeyka platform by Professor Sitaridou's team.
The innovative tool is designed by a Harvard undergraduate in Computer Science, Mr Matthew Nazari, himself a heritage speaker of Aramaic. Together they hope that this new tool will also pave the way for the production of language materials in a naturalistic learning environment away from the classroom, but based instead around everyday use, orality, and community.
Over the last 150 years, only four fieldworkers have collected data on Romeyka in Trabzon. By engaging with local communities, particularly female speakers, Professor Sitaridou has amassed the largest collection of audio and video data in existence collected monolingually and amounting to more than 29GB of ethically sourced data.
You can read more about the initiative, platform and major new findings in the full story published on the University of Cambridge website.
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