- Romeyka exhibits many interesting characteristics that are not found in other varieties of Greek and are not so common cross-linguistically. As such, a detailed knowledge of the Romeyka grammatical system would benefit linguistic theory more generally.
- Due to geographical isolation and the nature of the mountain village communities, there is significant micro-variation within the regions where Romeyka is spoken. Given their level of isolation, we can use this micro-variation to attempt to accurately model contact-induced syntactic change, which is notoriously evasive to capture theoretically.
- The overarching aim of this project is to study the evolution of Pontic Greek within the broader context of Asia Minor Greek. There are two critical issues, namely to what extent Pontic Greek:
(i) participated in the koineization process; and
(ii) contributed to the dialect formation processes that resulted in the emergence of the major Modern Greek dialects. Given the lack of sufficiently old textual evidence, which would normally provide clues as to the evolution of Pontic Greek, the conservative character of Romeyka, an endangered Greek variety still spoken in Turkey, means that the latter can be used as a ‘window on the past’ to better understand the former.