Greek settlers came to the Azov Sea region from the Crimea in the late 18th century. They founded the city of Mariupol and numerous villages around it. In the Crimea, urban Greeks spoke Greek-Tatar (so-called Urum), a dialect of Crimean Tatar, while Greeks from the villages could speak both Urum and their native Greek dialect Ruméjka. There were Urum and Ruméjka speakers among the migrants to the Azov Sea region. It seems that they never lived together in the Crimea, and they kept this tradition after they moved to the Azov Sea as well.
Greek dialect of the Azov Sea region (Ruméjka or Azov Greek) gathered much attention both from Russian/Soviet and European (mostly German and Greek) scholars.
Perhaps, the most discussed problem was the origin of Ruméjka. There are two wellknown hypotheses that usually migrate from paper to paper when Ruméjka is mentioned: this dialect is considered either a Pontic or a Northern Greek one.
The main goal of this paper is to demonstrate that Ruméjka should be described from a typological point of view and may be easily compared with other Modern Greek dialects. There is no doubt that Azov Greek will provide valuable information for
linguistic cartography and classification of Modern Greek dialects. This paper is based on field research data which were collected in various Greek-speaking villages around the city of Mariupol (Ukraine) in 2003–2005.