Italian colonists in the Dodecanese especially in Rhodes and Leros. The Kingdom of Italy occupied the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean sea during the Italian-Turkish war of 1911. In the 1919 Venizelos-Tittoni Agreement, Italy promised to cede the overwhelmingly Greek-inhabited islands, except Rhodes, to Greece, but this treaty was never implemented due to the Greek catastrophe in Asia Minor. With the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, the Dodecanese was formally annexed by Italy, as the "Possedimenti Italiani dell'Egeo". In the 1930s, Mussolini embarked on a program of Italianization, hoping to make the island of Rhodes a modern transportation hub that would serve as a focal
Koine Greek dialects and its own "Koine" form, which have preserved some of the ancient language's oral linguistic details which the written tradition has lost. For example, Pontic and Cappadocian Greek preserved the ancient pronunciation of etc.), while the Tsakonian language preserved the long α instead of η ( etc.) and the other local characteristics of Doric Greek. Dialects from the southern part of the Greek-speaking regions (Dodecanese, Cyprus, etc.), preserve the pronunciation of the double similar consonants (), while others pronounce in many words υ as ου or preserve ancient double forms ( etc.). Linguistic phenomena like the above imply that