The Cappadocians were encouraged to shift to Standard Modern Greek as part of their integration into Greece, and their language was thought to be extinct since the 1960s.

By the fifth century AD, the last of the Indo-European native languages of Asia Minor ceased to be spoken, replaced by Koine Greek.

The earliest records of the language are in the macaronic poems of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273), who lived in Iconium (Konya), and some ghazals by his son Sultan Walad.

Where Greek was maintained (numerous villages near Kayseri, including Misthi, Malakopea, Prokopion,[16] Karvali,[17][18] and Anakou), it became heavily influenced by the surrounding Turkish.

[19] After the population exchange, several Cappadocian dialects have been described by collaborators of the Center for Asia Minor Studies (Κέντρον Μικρασιατικών Σπουδών) in Athens: Uluağaç (I.I.

In recent years, the study of Cappadocian has seen a revival following the pioneering work on Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) by Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, and a series of publications on various aspects of Cappadocian linguistics by Mark Janse, professor at Roosevelt Academy, who has also contributed a grammatical survey of Cappadocian to a forthcoming handbook on Modern Greek dialects edited by Christos Tzitzilis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki).

[21] This process was pronounced in southwestern Cappadocia, and included the introduction of vowel harmony and verb-final word order.

In the documentary Last Words, which follows Mark Janse through Cappadocian-speaking villages on the Greek mainland, community members are seen encouraging each other to use their dialect for ordinary things, such as joke telling.

The members of these villages, including such notable figures as the bishop, recount being touched by a presentation given in Cappadocian by Janse on a visit to the region.

Additionally, younger generations are embracing the power of technology to spread awareness, utilising social media about the language to inform the larger Greek population.