Are there Greek speakers in Turkey today who speak the Pontian dialect?
There are still people in Turkey today who speak and understand Pontian, which is the oldest surviving Greek dialect. The members of this community come from Trebizond and are scattered throughout Turkey, or have emigrated to other countries. Pontian is spoken in 60 villages in the Trebizond region, most of them in the Of area. At a conservative estimate, I would say this dialect is spoken by around 300,000 people. You refer constantly to the “identity problem.” Why is this so important to you? Nowadays the identity problem comes up more often, and this is because traditional explanations, like official identity cards, don’t give adequate answers. Some say the search for identity is a fashion that comes and goes. In their view, everyone is an individual, a human being and nothing else. Regardless of what anyone thinks, I consider the important thing is to protect our language, which we inherited from our forebears, and which is disappearing because we don’t care about its disappearance
