[6] The Crimean peninsula was Greek-speaking for more than two and a half thousand years as a part of the ancient Greek colonies and of the Byzantine Empire.

Greek city-states began establishing colonies along the Black Sea coast of Crimea in the 7th or 6th century BC.

The beginning of large-scale settlement of Greeks in the steppe region north of the Sea of Azov dates to the Russo-Turkish War (1768–74), when Catherine the Great of Russia invited Greeks of Crimea to resettle to recently conquered lands (including founding Mariupol) to escape persecution in the then Muslim-dominated Crimea.

[citation needed] Mariupol Greek became subject of linguistic study in the late 1920s and 1930s, as part of the general program of identifying and describing languages of the USSR.

[10] Scholars of Greek from Kyiv, led by Andriy Biletsky compiled a detailed description of the language and recorded the folklore.

Though a number of writers and poets make use of the Cyrillic alphabet, the population of the region rarely uses it; the majority of self-identified ethnic Greeks of Ukraine now consider Russian their mother language.

Nonetheless, the latest investigations by Alexandra Gromova demonstrate that there is still hope that elements of the Rumaiic population will continue to use the dialect.