Cappadocian Greek (, also known as Cappadocian or Asia Minor Greek, is a dialect of modern Greek heavily influenced by Turkish, originally spoken in Cappadocia (modern-day Central Turkey) by the descendants of the Byzantine Greeks of Anatolia. The language originally diverged from Medieval Greek after the late medieval migrations of the Turks from Central Asia into what is now Turkey began cutting the Cappadocians off from the rest of the Greek-speaking Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. As a result of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, all remaining speakers (known in Turkey as Rûm, and referred to now as Cappadocian Greeks) were forced to emigrate to Greece where they were resettled in various locations, primarily in Central and Northern Greece. The Cappadocians were encouraged to shift to Standard Modern Greek as part of their integration in Greece, and their language was thought to be extinct since the 1960s. In June 2005, Mark Janse (Ghent University) and Dimitris Papazachariou (University of Patras) discovered Cappadocians in Central and Northern Greece who could still speak their ancestral language fluently. Many are middle-aged, third-generation speakers who take a very positive attitude towards the language, as opposed to their parents and grandparents. The latter are much less inclined to speak Cappadocian and more often than not switch to Standard Modern Greek. History and research By the fifth century AD, the last of the Indo-European native languages of Asia Minor ceased to be spoken, replaced by Koine Greek. At the same time, the communities of central Anatolia were becoming actively involved in the affairs of the then Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire, and some (now Greek-speaking) Cappadocians, such as Maurice Tiberius (r. 582–602) and Heraclius (r. 610 to 641), would even rise to become emperors. Cappadocian Greek first began to diverge from the Medieval Greek common language of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire six centuries later, following the Byzantines' defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. This subsequent civil war and the Seljuk invasion led to the severing of Cappadocia from the rest of the Byzantine world. By the 20th century Cappadocian Greek would come to be heavily influenced by Turkish, but unlike Standard Modern Greek, it would not be influenced by Venetian or French, which entered Modern Greek during the Frankokratia period, when those groups began ruling in Greece following the Fourth Crusade's sacking of Byzantine Constantinople. The earliest records of the language