Varieties of Modern Greek
The linguistic varieties of
Diglossia
Roots and history: Demotic and Katharevousa
Ever since the times of Koiné Greek in Hellenistic and Roman antiquity, there was a competition between the naturally evolving spoken forms of Greek on the one hand, and the use of artificially archaic, learned registers on the other. The learned registers employed grammatical and lexical forms in imitation of classical Attic Greek (Atticism).[1] This situation is known in modern linguistics as diglossia.[2]
During the Middle Ages, Greek writing varied along a continuum between extreme forms of the high register very close to Attic, and moderate forms much closer to the spoken
At the same time, spoken Demotic, while not recognised as an official language, nevertheless developed a supra-regional, de facto standard variety. From the late 19th century onwards, written Demotic rather than Katharevousa became the primary medium of literature. During much of the 20th century, there were heated political conflicts over the use of either of the two varieties, especially over the issue of their use in education. Schools were forced to switch from one form to the other and back several times during the 20th century. The conflict was resolved only after the overthrow of the
Standard Modern Greek
Modern linguistics has come to call the resulting variety "Standard Modern Greek" to distinguish it from the pure original Demotic of earlier literature and traditional vernacular speech. Greek authors sometimes use the term "Modern Greek Koiné" (Greek: Νεοελληνική Κοινή, romanized: Neoellinikí Koiní, lit. 'Common Modern Greek'), reviving the term
History of modern Greek dialects
The first systematic scholarly treatment of the modern Greek dialects took place after the middle of the 19th century, mainly thanks to the work of the prominent Greek linguist Georgios Hadjidakis.[11] The absence of descriptive accounts of the speech of individual regions made the efforts of the researchers of the 19th century more difficult.[12] Therefore, the dialects' forms are known to us only during their last phase (from the middle of the 19th century, and until the panhellenic dominance of the Standard Modern Greek).
Initial dialect differentiation
Modern linguistics is not in accord with the tendency of the 19th century scholars to regard modern Greek dialects as the direct descendants of the dialects of ancient Greek.[13] According to the latest findings of scholarship, modern Greek dialects are products of the dialect differentiation of Koiné Greek, and, with the exception of Tsakonian and possibly Italiot Greek, they have no correlation with the ancient dialects.[14]
It is difficult to monitor the evolution of
Historical literary dialects
Before the establishment of a common written standard of Demotic Greek, there were various approaches to using regional variants of Demotic as a written language. Dialect is recorded in areas outside
It is above all from the island of Crete, during the period of
Later, during the 18th and early 19th centuries, the
Modern varieties
Spoken modern vernacular Greek can be divided into various geographical varieties. There are a small number of highly divergent, outlying varieties spoken by relatively isolated communities, and a broader range of mainstream dialects less divergent from each other and from Standard Modern Greek, which cover most of the linguistic area of present-day
- Examples of Northern dialects are Rumelian, Epirote (except Thesprotia prefecture), Thessalian, Macedonian,[20] Thracian.
- The Southern category is divided into groups that include variety groups from:
- Megara, Aegina, Athens, Kymi (Old Athenian) and Mani Peninsula (Maniot)
- Peloponnese (except Mani), Cyclades, Crete and Ionian Islands
- Dodecanese and Cyprus.
- Parts of southern Albania (known as Northern Epirus among Greeks).[21]
- Asia Minor (Modern Turkey)
Outlying varieties
Tsakonian
Tsakonian is a highly divergent variety, sometimes classified as a separate language because of not being intelligible to speakers of standard Greek..
Pontic Greek
Pontic Greek varieties are those originally spoken along the eastern
Cappadocian Greek
Other varieties of Anatolian Greek that were influenced by the Turkish language, besides Pontic, are now almost extinct, but were widely spoken until 1923 in central Turkey, and especially in Cappadocia.[28] In 1923, all Orthodox Christian inhabitants of Asia Minor were forced to emigrate to Greece after the Greek genocide (1919–1921) during the Population exchange between Greece and Turkey.[29] In 2005, professors Mark Janse and Dimitris Papazachariou discovered that there are still native speakers of the Mistiot dialect of Cappadocian in Central and Northern Greece.[30] Cappadocian Greek diverged from the other Byzantine Greek varieties earlier, beginning with the Turkish conquests of central Anatolia in the 11th and 12th centuries, and so developed several radical features, such as the loss of the gender for nouns.[25] Having been isolated from the crusader conquests (Fourth Crusade) and the later Venetian influence of the Greek coast, it retained the Ancient Greek terms for many words that were replaced with Romance ones in Demotic Greek.[25] The poet Rumi, whose name means "Roman", referring to his residence amongst the "Roman" Greek speakers of Cappadocia, wrote a few poems in Cappadocian Greek, leaving one of the earliest attestations of the dialect.[31][32][33][34]
Pharasiot Greek
The Greek dialect spoken in Pharasa (Faraşa, now Çamlıca village in Yahyalı, Kayseri) and other nearby villages (Afshar-Köy, Çukuri), to the east of Cappadocia, is not particularly close to Cappadocian. It may be closer to Pontic, or equally distant from both. The Pharasiot priest Theodoridis published some folk texts. In 2018, Metin Bağrıaçık published a thesis on Pharasiot Greek, based on speakers remaining in Greece.[35]
Silliot Greek
The Greek dialect of
Italiot Greek
Griko or Italiot Greek refers to the Greek varieties spoken in some areas of southern Italy, a historical remnant of the ancient colonisation of Magna Graecia. There are two small Griko-speaking communities known as the Griko people who live in the Italian regions of Calabria, the southern tip of the Italian peninsula, and in Apulia, its south-easternmost corner. These varieties too are believed to have developed on the basis of an originally Doric ancient dialect, and have preserved some elements of it, though to a lesser extent than Tsakonian.[36] They subsequently adopted influences from ancient Koiné, but became isolated from the rest of the Greek-speaking world after the decline of Byzantine rule in Italy during the Middle Ages. Among their linguistic peculiarities, besides influences from Italian, is the preservation of the infinitive, which was lost in the modern Greek of the Balkans.
Mariupolitan
Istanbul Greek
Istanbul Greek is a dialect of Greek spoken in Istanbul, as well as by the Istanbul Greek emigre community in Athens. It is characterized by a high frequency of loanwords and grammatical structures imported from other languages, the main influences being Turkish, French, Italian and Armenian,
Greco-Australian
Greco-Australian is an Australian-based dialect of Greek that is spoken by the Greek diaspora of Australia, including Greek immigrants living in Australia and Australians of Greek descent.[41]
Other outlying varieties
In Asia Minor, Greek varieties existed not only in the broader area of Cappadocia, but also in the western coast. The most characteristic is the dialect of
Another Greek outlying dialect was spoken, until the mid-20th century, in
Core dialects
Unlike the above, the varieties described below form a contiguous Greek-speaking area, which covers most of the territory of Greece. They represent the vast majority of Greek speakers today. As they are less divergent from each other and from the standard, they are typically classified as mere "idioms" rather than "dialects" by Greek authors, in the native Greek terminology.
The most prominent contrasts between the present-day dialects are found between northern and southern varieties. Northern varieties cover most of continental Greece down to the
At the fringes of this former Arvanitika-speaking area, there were once some enclaves of highly distinct traditional Greek dialects, believed to have been remnants of a formerly contiguous Greek dialect area from the time before the Arvanitic settlement. These include the old local dialect of Athens itself ("Old Athenian"), that of Megara (to the west of Attica), of Kymi in Euboia and of the island of Aegina. These dialects are now extinct.[48]
The following linguistic markers have been used to distinguish and classify the dialects of Greece. Many of these features are today characteristic only of the traditional rural vernaculars and may be socially stigmatised. Younger, urban speakers throughout the country tend to converge towards accents closer to the standard language, with Cyprus being an exception to this.
Phonological features
- Northern vocalism (high vowel loss). In the north, unstressed Skiros, Lefkada and the urban dialect of the Greeks of Constantinople.
- Palatalisation. Standard Greek has an allophonic alternation between velar consonants ([k], [ɡ], [x], [ɣ]) and palatalised counterparts (([c], [ɟ], [ç], [ʝ]) before front vowels (/i/, /e/). In southern dialects, the palatalisation goes further towards affricates (e.g. [tʃe] vs. standard [ce] 'and'). Subtypes can be distinguished that have either palato-alveolar ([tʃ], [dʒ], [ʃ], [ʒ]) or alveolo-palatal sounds ([tɕ], [dʑ], [ɕ], [ʑ]). The former are reported for Cyprus, the latter for Crete, among others.[50]
- Tsitakism. In a core area in which the palatalisation process has gone even further, covering mainly the This phenomenon is known in Greek as tsitakism (τσιτακισμός). It was also shared by Old Athenian.
- Ypsilon. A highly archaic feature shared by Tsakonian, the Maniot dialect, and the Old Athenian enclave dialects, is the divergent treatment of historical /y/ (<υ>). While this sound merged to /i/ everywhere else, these dialects have /u/ instead (e.g. [ˈksulo] vs. standard [ˈksilo] 'wood').[50]
- Geminate consonants. Most Modern Greek varieties have lost the distinctively long (geminate) consonants found in Ancient Greek. However, the dialects of the south-eastern islands, including Cyprus, have preserved them, and even extended them to new environments such as word-initial positions. Thus, the word <ναι> 'yes' is pronounced with a distinctively long initial [nː] in Cypriot, and there are minimal pairs such as <φύλλο> [ˈfilːo] 'leaf' vs. <φύλο> [ˈfilo] 'gender', which are pronounced exactly the same in other dialects but distinguished by consonant length in Cypriot.[52]
- Dark /l/. A distinctive marker of modern northern vernaculars, especially of dark" (velarised) [ɫ] sound.
- Medial fricative deletion. Some dialects of the
- Nasals and voiced plosives. Dialects differ in their phonetic treatment of the result of the assimilation of nasals. All dialects have a voicing of the plosive in this position, but while some dialects also have an audible segment of prenasalisation, others do not; thus <πομπός> (pompós) 'transmitter' may be realised as either [poˈᵐbos] or [poˈbos].[54]Furthermore, prenasalisation tends to be preserved in more formal registers regardless of geography. In informal speech, it tends to be more common in northern varieties.
- Lack of synizesis of -ía, éa > /ja/. Standard Greek and most dialects have a pattern whereby Ancient Greek /e/ or /i/ immediately before an accented (later stressed) vowel have turned into a non-syllabic glide /j/,[citation needed] for instance in <παιδιά> [peˈðʝa] 'children', from Ancient Greek <παιδία> [pa͜idía]. In some dialects this process has not taken place or has done so only partially. These dialects display either full preservation of [e, i], or a schwa sound [ə], leading to forms such as <φωλέα> [foˈle.a] 'nest' and <παιδία> [peˈði.a] 'children'. The phenomenon is common in Griko and Pontic. It is also reported in Mani and Kythira.[55] On the other hand, in some dialects that have /j/, the glide gets further reduced and deleted after a preceding sibilant (/s, z/), leading to forms like <νησά> [niˈsa] 'islands' instead of standard <νησιά> [niˈsça] (de-palatalisation of sibilants[56]).
Grammatical features
- Final /n/. Most Modern Greek varieties have lost word-final -n, once a part of many inflectional suffixes of Ancient Greek, in all but very few grammatical words. The south-eastern islands have preserved it in many words (e.g. [ˈipen] vs. standard [ˈipe] he said; [tiˈrin] vs. standard [tiˈri] 'cheese').[52]
- inda? versus ti? In Standard Greek, the
- Indirect objects. All Modern Greek dialects have lost the indirect objects are those of the genitive case, as in example 1 below. In northern dialects, like Macedonian;[20] mainly in Thessaloniki, Constantinople, Rhodes, and in Mesa Mani, the accusative forms are used instead,[20][29] as in example 2. In plural, only the accusative forms are used both in southern and northern dialects[citation needed].
(1) | Standard Greek: | Σου you.GEN |
δίνω I-give |
το βιβλίο the book | |
(2) | Northern Greek: | Σε you.ACC |
δίνω I-give |
το βιβλίο the book | |
'I give you the book' |
References
- ^ Horrocks, Geoffrey (1997): Greek: a history of the language and its speakers. London: Longman. Ch. 5.5
- ^ Ferguson, Charles A. (1959): "Diglossia." Word 15: 325–340.
- JSTOR 1291674.
Although scholars have not been inclined to transpose to Byzantine literature the former conflict between καθαρεύουσα and δημοτική in modern Greek, the outward appearance of a clear dichotomy in learned and vernacular literature lasts, especially in the manuals, bibliography and lexica.
- ISBN 960-231-027-8.
- ^ Horrocks, ch.15.
- ^ Horrocks, ch.17.
- ^ Horrocks, ch.17.6.
- ^ Law 309/1976 "About the Organization and Administration of the General Education"
- Presidential Decree207/1982
- ^ Babiniotis (2007), 29
- ISBN 0-521-29978-0.
- ISBN 978-960-6715-39-6.
- ^ Browning (1983), 119: "Scholars of the generation of F.W. Mullach sought to find Dorisms and Aeolisms in the medieval and Modern Greek dialects, or even went further back, seeking the origin of certain of their characteristics in primitive "Indo-European".
- ^ Browning (1983), 119
* Kontosopoulos (2007), 149 - ^ Kontosopoulos (2007), 149
- ISBN 0-8014-3301-0.
Cretan dialect, Cyprus, literary.
- ^ Alexiou (2002), 29
- ^ For the distinction between "Greek dialects" and "Greek idioms", see Kontosopoulos, Nikolaos (1999): "Dialektoi kai idiomata". In: Manos Kopidaks et al. (eds.), Istoria tis ellinikis glossas.. Athens: Elliniko Logotechniko kai Istoriko Archeio. 188–205; Kontosopoulos (2008) 2–3; Trudgill (2003) 49 [Modern Greek dialects. A preliminary Classification, in: Journal of Greek Linguistics 4 (2003), p. 54-64] : "Dialekti are those varieties that are linguistically very different from Standard Greek [...] Idiomata are all the other varieties."
- ^ "Tromaktiko: Οι Νεοελληνικές διάλεκτοι".
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7923-5290-7.
- ^ Nick Nicholas. Appendix A. History & Diatopy of Greek. Archived 2004-12-06 at the Wayback Machine The story of pu: The grammaticalisation in space and time of a Modern Greek complementiser. December 1998. University of Melbourne, p. 20.
- ^ C.F.Voegelin; F.M. Voegelin (1977). "Tsakonian - A language of Greece". Elsevier. pp. 148–149. Archived from the original on 2012-12-10.
- ^ Brian Joseph. "Language Contact and the Development of Negation in Greek — and How Balkan Slavic Helps to Illuminate the Situation" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-04-07.
- ^ Horrocks, ch.4.4.3; C. Brixhe (2007): A modern approach to the ancient dialects, in: A. F. Christides (ed.), A history of Ancient Greek, Cambridge University Press, p.499.
- ^ a b c Dawkins, R.M. 1916. Modern Greek in Asia Minor. A study of dialect of Silly, Cappadocia and Pharasa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- ^ 500,000 (living in 300 villages) Pontic Greek speakers according to Myrtsioti, Time Resistant Dialects Archived 2011-07-21 at the Wayback Machine; 300,000 according to Trudgill (2003), 48
- ^ Mackridge, Peter (1987): "Greek-Speaking Moslems of North-East Turkey: Prolegomena to Study of the Ophitic Sub-Dialect of Pontic." Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 11: 115–137. Quoted in Horrocks, ch.14.2
- ^ Dawkins, R.M. (1916): Modern Greek in Asia Minor. A study of dialect of Silly, Cappadocia and Pharasa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Janse, The Cappadocian Language[permanent dead link].
- ^ ISBN 978-960-6715-39-6.
- ^ Cappadocian Archived 2007-09-29 at the Wayback Machine, Roosevelt Academy; Janse, The Cappadocian Language[permanent dead link]
- ^ Δέδες, Δ. 1993. Ποιήματα του Μαυλανά Ρουμή. Τα Ιστορικά 10.18–19: 3–22.
- ^ Meyer, G. 1895. Die griechischen Verse in Rabâbnâma. Byzantinische Zeitschrift 4: 401–411.
- ^ "Untitled Document". Archived from the original on 2012-08-05. Retrieved 2014-10-24.
- ^ "The Greek Poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi". Archived from the original on 2009-06-04. Retrieved 2024-01-13.
- ^ Metin Bağrıaçık, Pharasiot Greek: Word order and clause structure, Ghent University, 2018.
- ^ Horrocks, ch.14.2.3.
- ^ Dawkins, Richard M. "THE PONTIC DIALECT OF MODERN GREEK IN ASIA MINOR AND RUSSIA". Transactions of the Philological Society 36.1 (1937): 15–52.
- ^ "Greeks of the Steppe". The Washington Post. 10 November 2012. Retrieved 25 October 2014.
- ^ Kontosopoulos (2008), 109
- ^ Matthew John Hadodo (January 2018). "Pockets of Change: Salience and Sound Change in Istanbul Greek". Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory.
- ^ Kalimniou, Dean (29 June 2020). "Tongues of Greek Australia: An Anglicised Hellenic language". Neos Kosmos. Retrieved 22 October 2023.
- ^ Kontosopoulos (2008), 114–116; Trudgill (2003), 60
- ^ Blanken, Gerard (1951), Les Grecs de Cargèse (Corse): Recherches sur leur langue et sur leur histoire Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff. (see review in Language 30 (1954): 278–781. [1]); Nicholas, The deletion of final /s/ in Mani and Corsica Archived 2012-02-13 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ See Kontosopoulos (2008), 82–83, who regards Cargese as an "idiom".
- ISBN 0-521-08497-0
- ^ Map based on: Peter Trudgill (2003): Modern Greek dialects. A preliminary Classification. Journal of Greek Linguistics 4: 54–64 pdf Archived 2007-09-26 at the Wayback Machine. Shown in grey color is the core Greek-speaking area, in which Greek used to form a solid majority language among contiguous rural populations.
- ^ Kontosopoulos (1999); Trudgill (2003), 51.
- ^ Trudgill (2003), 51f.
- ^ Trudgill 2003: 53; Kontosopoulos 1999.
- ^ a b Trudgill 2003: 54.
- ^ Trudgill 2003: 56, quoting Newton 1972: 133.
- ^ a b Trudgill 2003: 57.
- ^ Trudgill 2003: 53, citing Newton 1972.
- ^ Trudgill 2003: 49, citing M. Triandaphyllides, Neoelliniki Grammatiki. Vol. 1: Istoriki Isagogi (Thessaloniki: M. Triandaphyllidis Foundation, 1938), 66-8; and C. Tzitzilis, "Neoellinikes dialekti ke neoelliniki dialektologia", in Egkiklopedikos Odigos gia ti Glossa, ed. A. F. Christidis (Thessaloniki: Kentro Ellinikis Glossas, 2001), 170.
- ^ Kontosopoulos 2008: 14, 66, 78.
- ^ The phenomenon is reported in Griko, Peloponnese, and on some Aegean islands (Kontosopoulos 2008: 74)
- ^ Kontosopoulos 1999.