15 Facts About Pontic Greek

Pontic Greek is an endangered Indo-European language spoken by about 778,000 people worldwide.

Pontic Greek is one of the languages of the Greek branch separate from Mainland Greek.

Pontic Greek is classified as an Indo-European, Greek language of the Attic-Ionic branch.

Historically, the speakers of Pontic Greek called it simply, which is a historical and colloquial term for Modern Greek in general.

Similarly, in Turkish, there is no special name for Pontic Greek; it is called, derived from the Turkish word Rum, denoting Byzantine Greeks.

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Similar to most modern Greek dialects, Pontic Greek is mainly derived from Koine Greek, which was spoken in the Hellenistic and Roman times between the 4th century BC and the 4th century AD.

The Pontians remained somewhat isolated from the mainland Greeks, causing Pontic Greek to develop separately and distinctly from the rest of the mainland Greek.

In phonology, some varieties of Pontic Greek are reported to demonstrate vowel harmony, a well-known feature of Turkish.

Ophitic has retained the infinitive, which is present in Ancient Greek but has been lost in other variants of Modern Greek; it has therefore been characterized as "archaic" or conservative and as the living language that is closest to Ancient Greek.

Pontic Greek is still spoken by large numbers of people in Ukraine, mainly in Mariupol, but in other parts of Ukraine such as the Odessa and Donetsk region, in Russia and Georgia.

In Greece, Pontic is many times used only emblematically rather than as a medium of communication due to the mixing of Pontic and other Greeks.

In Greece, Pontic has no official status, like all other Greek dialects.

Historically, Pontic Greek was the de facto language of the Greek minority in the USSR, although in the of 1926, organised by the Greek-Soviet intelligentsia, it was decided that Demotic should be the official language of the community.

The use of Pontic Greek has been maintained more by speakers in North America than it has in Greece.

The Pontic Wikipedia uses Greek script: it has adopted ea, e? for these vowels, to avoid clashes with Modern Greek ?a, ??, and uses digraphs from the Soviet system instead of diacritics, but otherwise follows historical orthography.