Pontic Greek is a Greek language which was originally spoken on the shores of the Black Sea ("Pontus").
Pontic's linguistic lineage stems from Attic Greek, and contains influences from Byzantine Greek , Turkish influence and some Persian and Caucasian borrowings.
Greeks colonies have been set up on the shores of the Black Sea since antiquity, they have been under Byzantine control in the Middle Ages and remained isolated from the rest of the Greek-speaking world afterward.
Pontic was imported to Greece with the multitude of Greek immigrants from Turkey after the 1923 population exchange that followed the Treaty of Lausanne. Further immigration of Pontic-speaking Greeks followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Nowadays, Pontic is spoken by 350,000 people, of which 200,000 in Greece and 120,000 in Georgia ("Rumka"). Small communities continue to exist in other countries of the former Soviet Union and Turkey. A small portion of Greek-Americans speaks Pontic.
There is little mutual understanding between Pontic and Standard Greek.
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