Pontic Greek Alphabet

Pontic Greek (Ποντιακά, Pontiaká) is written in Greece with the ordinary Greek alphabet of 24 letters: Α α, Β β, Γ γ, Δ δ, Ε ε, Ζ ζ, Η η, Θ θ, Ι ι, Κ κ, Λ λ, Μ μ, Ν ν, Ξ ξ, Ο ο, Π π, Ρ ρ, Σ σ ς, Τ τ, Υ υ, Φ φ, Χ χ, Ψ ψ, Ω ω. Words carry the same single accent as modern Greek, the tonos on the stressed vowel (ά έ ή ί ό ύ ώ), the two dots of the dialytika (ϊ ϋ) keep two vowels apart, and σ still becomes ς at the end of a word. Speakers themselves often call the language Ρωμαίικα (Romeíka), 'Roman', after the old name of the Byzantine Empire.

Pontic has the sounds of English sh, the s in 'measure', ch and j, and the Greek alphabet has no letters of their own for them. Pontic writers in Greece often mark them with a small caron (háček) over the letter: σ̌ for sh, ζ̌ for zh, τσ̌ for ch and τζ̌ for j. Spelling is not regulated by any academy, so books and websites differ: the caron is one convention, other writers mark these sounds in other ways, and a quick message may leave the mark off and let the reader supply the sound.

There is no ready-made 'sigma with caron' in Unicode. σ̌ is two characters, the plain σ followed by the combining caron U+030C, which settles on top of whatever letter comes before it. That is why the symbol grid above holds the caron as its own cell: copy it right after σ, ζ or the second letter of τσ and τζ.

Pontic Greek vs standard Greek: what the spelling shows

Pontic grew up on the southern shore of the Black Sea, the region the Greeks called Πόντος (Pontus), around Trebizond (today Trabzon), Samsun and Giresun. Cut off from the rest of the Greek world for centuries after the Middle Ages, it kept its own course: speakers of standard Greek usually find spoken Pontic hard to follow, and linguists treat it as a separate variety; it has its own language code, pnt, next to Greek's el.

A few differences show up straight away in writing. 'What' is ντο rather than τι, so 'What are you saying?' is Ντο λες;. Many words lose their final vowel in speech, and the apostrophe marks the gap: πουλί μ’ 'my bird', a common term of endearment, where standard Greek says πουλί μου. Pontic also keeps some old sounds that standard Greek has lost, such as an e where standard Greek says i for some words spelled with the ancient η, and it has a layer of words borrowed from Turkish, Persian and the languages of the Caucasus.

Because the apostrophe is so frequent, use the typographic ’ (U+2019), Unicode’s preferred character for an apostrophe; it is the same character standard Greek uses in σ’ αγαπώ. Questions end with the Greek question mark ;, which looks like an English semicolon, and quotations go in « » as in standard Greek.

How to type the Pontic Greek alphabet and σ̌ on a keyboard

Start with a Greek keyboard layout. Windows: Settings, Time & language, Language & region, add Greek, then switch with Windows + Space. Mac: System Settings, Keyboard, Input Sources, add Greek. The tonos is a dead key: press the key right of L, then the vowel, for ά έ ή ί ό ύ ώ. Phones: add the Greek keyboard and long-press a vowel for ά or ϊ. The Greek collection explains the standard letters and accents in detail.

The caron needs one extra step because no Greek layout has it. Word: type the letter, then 030C and Alt+X, and σ becomes σ̌. Mac: open the Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space), search 'combining caron' and insert it after the letter. HTML: write the letter followed by ̌. On phones the quickest way is to copy σ̌, ζ̌, τσ̌ and τζ̌ from this page once and keep them in a note or as text replacements. If a font draws the caron to one side, the characters are still right; it is the font that lacks good support for marks on Greek letters.

Where Pontic Greek is spoken

CLDR estimates about 390,000 speakers of Pontic in Greece 🇬🇷, nearly all of them descendants of the Greeks of Pontus who came to Greece in waves before, during and after the 1923 population exchange, and who settled above all in Greek Macedonia and around Athens. Pontic is strongest among the older generation; younger people meet it through family, songs and the many Pontic cultural associations, and pay like everyone else in Greece in euros €, earlier in drachmas ₯. See the Greece collection for the country's flag, food and emoji.

Other Pontic communities grew up in the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union, in southern Russia, Georgia and Crimea; in the 1920s and 1930s Soviet Pontic-language publications used a simplified Greek orthography, while schools taught Demotic Greek; Greek-language publishing was suppressed after 1938, and many of these families have since moved to Greece. In north-eastern Turkey a closely related variety, known as Romeyka, is still spoken by Muslim villagers around Trabzon and is written, when it is written at all, in Latin letters following Turkish spelling habits; the Turkish collection has those letters. The Georgian and Russian collections cover the other countries where Pontic families lived.

Pontic Greek emoji: the eagle, the lyra and 19 May

There is no Pontic flag emoji. The flag used by Pontic associations shows a black eagle on a yellow field, based on the single-headed eagle on ancient Sinope coins, so people can write it as 🦅 with the colours 💛🖤, or next to 🇬🇷.

🎻 stands for the Pontic lyra (κεμεντζέ, kemençe), a narrow three-stringed fiddle held upright, whose fast tunes drive the line dances such as the warlike σέρρα (serra), danced with shaking shoulders. 🕯️ and 🖤 suit posts on 19 May, the day the Greek Parliament set in 1994 to remember the Pontic Greek genocide. ⛪ can stand for Παναγία Σουμελά, the monastery of Soumela above Trabzon, whose icon now has a new church on Mount Vermio in Greece where Pontic Greeks gather on 15 August. And 🐟 is for χαψία, the Black Sea anchovies that are the favourite fish of Pontic kitchens.