 The original Greek (and in some regions Armenian) speakers imposed features from their mother language into the Turkish spoken in the region.Heath W. Lowry's work with Halil İnalcık on Ottoman tax books ("Tahrir Defteri") provides detailed demographic statistics for the city of Trabzon and its surrounding areas during the Ottoman period.It is possible that the majority of the population of Trabzon and Rize (and other ancient Greek colonies in the Pontus region) — except up to the time of the Chepni Turk immigration waves — consisted of indigenous Caucasian tribes (the Colchians and the Laz) who had been partly Hellenized religiously and linguistically.