The History
Romeyka holds within it the echoes of ancient civilizations, colonization, and the enduring cultural heritage of its speakers. This...
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Romeyka captures important developments in the world around us. Language is powerful, and protecting it preserves culture.
Our Mission
Languages are carriers of cultures, beliefs, and connection, through history and into the future. Romeyka Everlasting is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization devoted to preserving Romeyka and its heritage, using technologies in computational linguistics to document, promote, and research the language. In rediscovering Romeyka, Romeyka Everlasting brings to light the unheard experiences of the community and fosters the continuity of its traditions for posterity.
Impact
Documentation
Awareness
Research
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Published linguistic research
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Nationally/Internationally recognized award-winning low-resource NLP research
Events
The Project
Documentation
400+
minutes elicitation
15K
words recorded
2K
bilingual pairs
Documentary & Book
Research Outputs
Zeyneb N. Kaya
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (PLSA), 2023
This paper investigates the morpho-syntactic features of language contact in the endangered Greek dialect Romeyka with Turkish. We analyze the use of the borrowed negative existential jok to (a) determine its role in Romeyka’s negation patterns (b) examine the effects of contact in Romeyka through cross-linguistic comparisons of jok with Turkish and forms of the dialect as spoken in Greece and (c) apply the identified grammatical patterns of jok to Myers-Scotton’s linguistic explanations for the code switching phenomena in the Matrix Language Turnover Hypothesis. The analysis demonstrates the pervasive influence of Turkish on the morpho-syntax of Romeyka through the incorporation of Turkish grammatical structures. We observe changes in the fundamental predicate grammar that are aligned with Turkish and that are inconsistent with Pontic’s existential constructions where the verb indicating existence is used. The patterns of contact confirm the Matrix Language hypothesis and provide evidence that indicate that Romeyka may be undergoing language turnover. Our findings are relevant to further understanding code switching among speakers of minority languages and assessing the vitality of Romeyka in Turkey.
Zeyneb N. Kaya
National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium (NJSHS), 2023
Broad-ranging machine translation systems are crucial across domains in defense, healthcare, and education, and help make diverse minority voices heard. Low-data conditions have been a persisting challenge in Deep Learning, and in Natural Language Processing and multilingual tasks, addressing this is especially complex. I propose MADLIBS (Multilingual Augmentation of Data with Alignment-Based Substitution), a new multilingual Data Augmentation (DA) method for Neural Machine Translation, specifically with the goal of inclusivity and supporting under-resourced languages. It consists of an attention-based encoder-decoder aligner, a semi-supervised POS-tagger, and a template generator to generate diversified and semantically consistent sentence pairs. Taking a fundamentally unique approach, it improves NMT systems and surpasses state-of-the-art established DA methods, without the use of external data.
Blog & Podcast
A Word From the Founder
Languages are the home of cultures and traditions, glimpses into the past and the future, each one unique and yet all interconnected in so many ways. There are so many languages spoken around the world, and yet so many of them are at the risk of disappearing forever. Protecting them is crucial in preserving communities and understanding human society itself.
The endangered Romeyka dialect is one embedded with rich history, its unique properties unlike any other and its culture a large part in its distinctiveness. It represents the connections of countries yet also the retention of its early forms. My relatives in Turkey grew up among the speakers of this rare and beautiful language, within the diversity of beliefs and values. They spoke languages that varied from more than just Turkish. I was fascinated by the ways in which Romeyka held such knowledge, and how important it was that it could be restored so that the story it carried would not be lost.
To preserve the valuable and captivating culture of Romeyka, Romeyka Everlasting was founded, committed to revitalizing the dialect and its customs. Working towards uniting and embracing the individual cultures of people around the world, the non-profit helped me become a part of sharing the stories of those who were unheard.
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