Cappadocian, also known as Cappadocian Greek or Asia Minor Greek, is a dialect of the Greek language, formerly spoken in Cappadocia (Central Turkey). After the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s, Cappadocian speakers were forced to emigrate to Greece, where they were resettled in various locations, especially in Central and Northern Greece. The Cappadocians rapidly shifted to Standard Modern Greek and their language was thought to be extinct since the 1960s. In June 2005, Mark Janse (Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg) and Dimitris Papazachariou (University of Patras) discovered Cappadocians in Central and Northern Greece who could still speak their native language fluently. Amongst them are middle-aged, third-generation speakers who take a very positive attitude towards the language as opposed to their parents and grandparents. The latter are much less inclined to speak Cappadocian and more often than not switch to Standard Modern Greek. A survey of Cappadocian speakers and language use is currently in preparation. Map showing Cappadocia as a province of the Armenian Empire under Tigranes the Great Photo of a 15th Century map showing Capadocia. In ancient geography, Cappadocia (or Capadocia) (from Persian: Katpatuka meaning the land of beautiful horses, Greek: Καππαδοκία; see also List of traditional Greek place names; Turkish Kapadokya) was an... An endangered language is a language with so few surviving speakers that it is in danger of falling out of use. ... An extinct language (also called a dead language) is a language which no longer has any native speakers. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... The Indo-European languages comprise a family of several hundred related languages and dialects [1], including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many spoken in the Indian subcontinent (South Asia), the Iranian plateau (Southwest Asia), and Central Asia. ... Attic Greek is the ancient dialect of the Greek language that was spoken in Attica, which includes Athens. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... Not to be confused with the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of the sounds of human speech. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... This chart shows concisely the most common way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is applied to represent the English language. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Greek ( IPA: or ελληνικά IPA: — Hellenic) is an Indo-European language with a documented history of 3,500 years, the longest of any other single language in that language family. ... Map showing Cappadocia as a province of the Armenian Empire under Tigranes the Great Photo of a 15th Century map showing Capadocia. In ancient geography, Cappadocia (or Capadocia) (from Persian: Katpatuka meaning the land of beautiful horses, Greek: Καππαδοκία; see also List of traditional Greek place names; Turkish Kapadokya) was an... Cartoon depicting a Turk and a Greek arguing over the exchange. ... Main article: Greek language Modern Greek (Νέα Ελληνικά or Νεοελληνική, lit. ... Mark Janse (born 1959) is professor of linguistics and classics and head of the department of Arts & Humanities at the Roosevelt Academy, a small liberal arts college in Middelburg, the Netherlands. ... Roosevelt Academy is a small liberal arts college located in Middelburg in the Netherlands. ... University of Patras (Greek: Πανεπιστήμιο Πατρών Panepistimio Patron) is a university located 6 km northeast of downtown Patras, 3 km S of the Rio-Antirio bridge, 206 km W of Athens, 106 km NE...

History and research

Cappadocian evolved out of Byzantine Greek. After the battle of Manzikert in 1071, Cappadocia was cut off from the rest of the Greek-speaking world and Turkish became the lingua franca in the region. Byzantine Greek is an archaic variant of Greek language derived from Koine which was used by the administration of the Byzantine Empire from 395 until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. ... Combatants Byzantine Empire Seljuk Turks Commanders Romanus IV Nikephoros Bryennios Theodore Alyates Andronikos Doukas Alp Arslan Strength ~ 30,000 ~ 70,000 Casualties About 10,000[citation needed] Unknown The Battle of Manzikert, or The Battle of Malazgirt, was fought between the Byzantine Empire and Seljuk forces led by Alp Arslan... Lingua franca, literally Frankish language in Italian, was originally a mixed language consisting largely of Italian plus a vocabulary drawn from Turkish, Persian, French, Greek and Arabic and used for communication throughout the Middle East. ...

The earliest records of the language are in the macaronic Turco-Persian poems of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, who lived in Iconium (Konya), and his son Sultan Veled. The texts have proven difficult to make sense of as they are written in Arabic script, in Rumi's case without vowel points; Dedes' is the most recent edition and rather more successful than others. Macaronic refers to text spoken or written using a mixture of languages. ... Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī[2] (Persian: ‎ , Turkish: Mevlânâ Celâleddin Mehmed Rumi) , also known as Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī (Persian: ‎ ), but known to the English-speaking world simply as Rumi, (1207–1273 CE) was a 13th century Persian... Tomb of Mevlana Rumi is a popular attraction of Konya. ...

Many Cappadocians shifted to Turkish altogether (written with the Greek alphabet, Karamanlidika) and where Greek was maintained (Sille, villages near Kayseri, Pharasa town and other nearby villages), it became heavily influenced by the surrounding Turkish. Unfortunately, there are next to no written documents in Medieval or early Modern Cappadocian, as the language was and still is essentially without a written tradition. The earliest descriptions of Cappadocian date from the 19th century, but are generally not very accurate. Karamanlides are a Turkish-speaking ethnic group that are of Orthodox Christian faith. ...

The first reliable grammar of Cappadocian is "Modern Greek in Asia Minor. A study of dialect of Silly, Cappadocia and Pharasa." (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916) by the first Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, Richard MacGillivray Dawkins (1871-1955), based on fieldwork conducted by the author in Cappadocia in 1909-1911. The University of Oxford (usually abbreviated as Oxon. ... Richard MacGillivray Dawkins (1871-4 May 1955) was a British archaeologist. ...

After the population exchange, several Cappadocian dialects have been described by collaborators of the Center for Asia Minor Studies (Κέντρον Μικρασιατικών Σπουδών) in Athens: Ulağaç (I.I. Kesisoglou, 1951), Aravan (D. Phosteris & I.I. Kesisoglou, 1960), Axo (G. Mavrochalyvidis & I.I. Kesisoglou, 1960) and Anaku (A.P. Costakis, 1964), resulting in a series of grammars (although regrettably not all Cappadocian villages were covered). The Pharasiot priest Theodoridis also published some folk texts.

In recent years, the study of Cappadocian has seen a revival following the pioneering work on "Language contact, creolization, and genetic (linguistics)" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) by Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, and a series of publications on various aspects of Cappadocian linguistics by Mark Janse, professor at Roosevelt Academy, who has also contributed a grammatical survey of Cappadocian to a forthcoming handbook on Modern Greek dialects edited by Christos Tzitzilis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki). Language contact occurs when speakers of distinct speech varieties interact. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Creole language. ... Genetic, in linguistics, means due to descent from a common ancestor language, rather than borrowing at some time in the past between languages that were not necessarily descended from a common ancestor. ... Roosevelt Academy is a small liberal arts college located in Middelburg in the Netherlands. ... The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (often referred to in English as Aristotelian University), named after the philosopher Aristotle, is the largest university of Greece. ...

The recent discovery of Cappadocian speakers by Janse and Papazachariou will result in a new grammar, dictionary and collection of texts.

Cappadocian Greek is well known from the linguistic literature as being one of the first well documented cases of language death, and in particular the significant admixture of non-Indo-European linguistic features into an Indo-European language. This process was pronounced on South-Western Cappadocia, and included the introduction of vowel harmony and verb-final word order. This does not cite its references or sources. ... Vowel harmony (also metaphony) is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels. ...

Characteristics

The Greek element in Cappadocian is to a large extent Byzantine, e.g. θír or tír "door" from (Ancient and) Byzantine Greek θύρα (Modern Greek θύρα), píka or épka "I did" from Byzantine Greek έποικα (Modern Greek έκανα). Other, pre-Byzantine, archaisms are the use of the possessive pronouns mó(n), só(n) etc. from Ancient Greek εμός, σός etc. and the formation of the imperfect tense by means of the suffix -išk- from the Ancient Greek (Ionic) iterative suffix -(i)sk-. Turkish influence appears at every level. The Cappadocian sound system includes the Turkish vowels ı, ö, ü, and the Turkish consonants b, d, g, š, ž, tš, dž (although some of these are also found in Greek words as a result of palatalization). Turkish vowel harmony is found in forms such as düšündǘzu "I think", aor. 3sg düšǘntsü < düšǘntsi (Malakopi), from Turkish düşünmek, patišáxıs < patišáxis "king" (Delmeso), from Turkish padişah. Cappadocian noun morphology is characterized by the emergence of a generalized agglutinative declension and the progressive loss of grammatical gender distinctions, e.g. to néka "the (neuter) woman (feminine)", genitive néka-ju, plural nékes, genitive nékez-ju (Ulağaç). Another Turkish feature is the morphological marking of definiteness in the accusative case, e.g. líkos "wolf (nominative / unmarked indefinite accusative)" vs. líko "wolf (marked definite accusative)". Agglutinative forms are also found in the verb system such as the pluperfect tense írta ton "I had come" (lit. "I came I was") (Delmeso) on the model of Turkish geldi idi (geldiydi). Although Cappadocian word order is essentially governed by discourse considerations such as topic and focus, there is a tendency towards the Turkish Subject Object Verb word order with its typological correlates (suffixation and pre-nominal grammatical modifiers). The imperfect tense, in the classical grammar of several Indo-European languages, denotes a past tense with an imperfective aspect. ... Look up affix in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... See also consonance in music. ... Palatalization means pronouncing a sound nearer to the hard palate, making it more like a palatal consonant; this is towards the front of the mouth for a velar or uvular consonant, but towards the back of the mouth for a front (e. ... Vowel harmony (also metaphony) is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels. ... Noun or noun substantive is a lexical category which is defined in terms of how its members combine with other grammatical kinds of expressions. ... For other uses, see Morphology. ... An agglutinative language is a language in which the words are formed by joining morphemes together. ... In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns and adjectives to indicate such features as number (typically singular vs. ... In linguistics, grammatical gender is a morphological category associated with the expression of gender through inflection or agreement. ... An agglutinative language is a language in which the words are formed by joining morphemes together. ... It has been suggested that Verbal agreement be merged into this article or section. ... The pluperfect tense (from Latin: plus quam perfectum more than perfect) is a perfective tense that exists in most Indo-European languages, used to refer to an event that has completed before another past action. ... Word order, in linguistic typology, refers to the order in which words appear in sentences across different languages. ... Discourse is a term used in semantics as in discourse analysis, but it also refers to a social conception of discourse, often linked with the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Jürgen Habermas The Theory of Communicative Action (1985). ... Look up topic, topicality in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... In linguistics, the focus determines which part of the sentence contributes the most important information. ... In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order. ...

The commonality among all Greek Cappadocian dialects is that they evolved from Byzantine Greek under the influence of Turkish. On the other hand, those dialects evolved in isolated villages. This has resulted in a variety of Greek Cappadocian dialects.

Dialects

• Northeastern Cappadocian (Sinasos, Potamia plus Delmeso)
• Northwestern Cappadocian (Silata or Zila, Anaku, Flojita, Malakopi)
• Central Cappadocian (Axo; Misti)
• Southwestern Cappadocian (Aravan, Gurzono; Fertek)
• Southeastern Cappadocian (Ulağaç, Semendere)

• Farasiot: dialect of Pharasa town (Develi in Kayseri) and other nearby villages (Afshar-Köy, Çukuri), more closely related to Pontic, though both are the closest relatives of Cappadocian
• Sille

Kayseri (Greek: Καισάρεια), in the antiquity Mazaka and later Caesarea, is an industrialized city in Turkey. ... Pontus was a name applied in ancient times to extensive tracts of country in the northeast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) bordering on the Euxine (Black Sea), which was often called simply Pontos (the Main), by the Greeks. ...

External links

• Ethnologue report for Cappadocian Greek
• Web-page Mark Janse

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