The Pontic Greek spoken by Muslims in the villages of Bes ̧ köy in the province of present-day Trabzon Hakan Özkan University of Münster This article consists of two parts. The first part provides general information on the language and its speakers: I describe the language, land, and livelihood of the Greek- speaking people of Beş köy in Trabzon province. In this respect it is indispensable to mention migration, which is one of the most serious threats the Greek-speaking commu- nity and their language faces today; statistical data show that Beş köy lost half of its popu- lation over the past fifty years. Despite these adverse conditions, the language has proved to be resilient enough to remain a preferred means of communication when Greek-speakers come together. In the last subsection, on language and identity, I present testimonies by native people which illustrate that positive attitudes towards both the Greek language and Turkish citizenship or Islamic identity are easily compatible. The second part comprises a linguistic discussion of the language and aims at giving an overview of its main features. It describes its phonological system, and points out some of its most interesting morphological and syntactical characteristics. Special emphasis is laid on the differences to the Sarachos variety that has been studied by Peter Mackridge. 1 The external setting for the language General information on language and speakers Muslim Pontic, is a Greek dialect spoken by the inhabitants of various villages east and west of the provincial capital in the Trabzon prefecture (north-east Turkey). As a result of the population exchange stipulated in the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, Pontic-speaking Muslims were allowed to stay, while Christian Pontians had to leave their home and emi- grate to Greece. According to my recent research and the earlier findings of Andrews and Mackridge today Pontic-speakers live in four parts of Trabzon: 2 1 I am very grateful to Peter Mackridge, who provided me with many useful hints and took great pains to read and re-read the draft of this article. Also, I would like to express my gratitude to the DFG (German Research Foundation) for their support. 2 P. A. Andrews, Ethnic Groups in the Republic of Turkey (Wiesbaden 1989) 204 and P. Mackridge, ‘Greek-Speaking Moslems of north-east Turkey: Prolegomena to a study of the Ophitic sub-dialect of Pontic’, BMGS 11 (1987) 115–37, at 115 (hereafter ‘Prolegomena’). Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Vol. 37 No. 1 (2013) 1–21 © 2013 Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham DOI: 10.1179/0307013112Z.00000000023