Pragmatics - Volume 19, Issue 3, 2009

Since the early 90s, Greece has witnessed an unprecedented population movement: Members of indigenous linguistic minorities have moved from the periphery to urban centres and large numbers of people have moved to Greece, primarily from the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. This “flow of bodies” (Appadurai 1990) has disrupted the country’s monolingual and monocultural image (even if, in historical terms, this was in itself a construction) and in its place an awareness and sensibility of a multilingual and multicultural society has emerged.

This paper examines the role of the lexical pairs άνδρας/άντρας ‘man’ vs. γυναίκα ‘woman’ and αγόρι ‘boy’ vs. κορίτσι ‘girl’ in the construction of gender identity. We use corpus methodology to study the frequency, meanings and collocations of the noun pairs in five different genres of Greek, namely news and opinion articles from newspapers, and general interest, male and female magazines (2,4 million words in total). Our findings point to a fundamental asymmetry in the treatment of the two genders. Furthermore, genre and audience design are found to be prominent in gender construction: In general, male identity is viewed in similar ways in all genres, whereas female identity is constructed in a less uniform way, since texts addressed to women significantly diverge from other genres. Thus, lexical choices are affected by the positioning of the text producer as a member of an in-group, especially in genres in which gender is foregrounded.

The present paper is concerned with the narratives produced in the conversations of six young people in Greece. Drawing on the broader framework of Discourse Analysis and Sociolinguistics as well as on the Social Constructionist paradigm, our paper follows the line of research that focuses on situated analysis of identities. Initially, the paper sets out to examine the identity(ies) constructed through the stories these people tell in the specific encounters. The overall aim of the paper is to relate these locally constructed identities to the larger socio-cultural identity of the participants and to examine whether they can be seen as indices of Greekness. Our analysis shows that, in the course of their story-telling, the participants construct ‘in-group’ identities mainly by co-constructing their narratives and by performing successive narratives with a similar point. The interactants’ foregrounding and cultivation of their in-group identity is probably an indication of their Greekness, namely of the attested tendency of Greek people to value and thus cultivate in-group relations of intimacy and solidarity in interaction.

The purpose of this paper is to examine practices of language alternation in email communication among native speakers of Greek and to argue that such practices are a facet of the performative construction of an ‘online’ communicative identity. In the slowly-growing body of literature on linguistic practices in computer-mediated communication (CMC) or computer-mediated discourse (CMD) it is emerging that concomitant aspects of linguistic performance relate to the construction of particular sociolinguistic identities relevant to the medium, or, to adopt a less radical perspective, that sociolinguistic identities typical of face-to-face or written interaction are mediated by the social/communicative practices and norms relevant to, or accruing to, types of CMD. Language alternation features prominently among the mechanisms used in constructing such novel linguistic/social-performative identities. In this context, the research presented in this paper examines the performance of a group of six native speakers of Greek, who are also part of a relatively closely-knit social network. The analysis reveals extensive code-switching between Greek and English, both inter- and intra-sentential, with English covering around 20% of the total of words used. The qualitative analysis shows that expressions of affect and evaluative comments are mostly in English, while Greek is reserved for the transmission of factual/referential information. The data further reveal that extensive style- or register-shifting and mixing is a favored strategy among members of the group; such mixing includes shifting among dialects or sociolects of Greek, the use of other languages, and, notably, the use of constructed words and structures with humorous overtones. This complex type of language play is an overarching feature of the group’s (socio)linguistic performance in asynchronous electronic communication, which may single them out as a localized community of practice. The data highlight the theoretical and methodological necessity for fine-grained accounts of specific types of CMD, which can be tackled not in terms of overarching macro-contextual linguistic and extralinguistic variables, but as dynamic reflexes both of specific participant constellations and of the negotiation of emerging generic norms within localized communities of practice. The paper also presents and discusses a quantitative study of views and attitudes on language alternation expressed by subjects who code-switch systematically on email, in an attempt to gauge the types of metalinguistic awareness involved. It emerges from the quantitative study that users abstract away from ‘phobic’ attitudes towards the use of English and that they treat language alternation as a manifestation of balanced or functional bilingualism, which is furthermore situation-specific and ‘genre’-appropriate.

The aim of this study is to investigate the choice of alphabetical encoding in Greek text-messaging (or Short Message Service, SMS). The analysis will be based on a corpus of 447 text-messages exchanged among participants who belong to the age group of ‘youth’ (15-25 years old) and live in Athens (Greece). The data analysis will show that the standard practice of writing with Greek characters represents the norm in Greek SMS. The script norm will be discussed in relation to the medium’s technological affordances and the participants’ stance towards new media. The analysis will then focus on non-standard graphemic choices, such as the use of both, Greek and Roman, alphabets in the encoding of single messages. It will be demonstrated that such marked choices are employed as a means of indexing the participants’ affiliation with global popular cultures and enhancing expressivity in a medium of reduced paralinguistic cues.

Any glo bally circulating piece of research that flags up a particular national-language context as its centre of attention is bound to raise a twofold expectation in this day and age: To discuss a specific state of affairs in a particular language/society, and to use this as a case in point to cast light on wider theoretical, methodological or empirical issues. The contributions to this issue take their cue from recent sociolinguistics and discourse studies to address aspects of Greek language and discourse, culture and identity in Greece, Cyprus, and the Greek diaspora. In reflecting on the preceding four papers, I shall be asking what they tell us as about Greek and Greekness, whether this Greekness is made relevant as discursive process or interpretive motif, and also how these Greek cases may contribute to our understanding of wider processes of language, society, identity and communication technologies.

Language ideology as a field of inquiry (Woolard et al. 1998: 3) involves, among others, the critical analysis of inequalities manifest in discursive and textual practices. This paper deals with folklore practices and language ideologies related to the project for the collection and publication of oral traditions in 1930s Greece. The institutionalization of this project relied heavily on G.Chatzidakis (1890-1923), Professor of Linguistics and N.G. Politis (1852-1921), Professor of Comparative Mythology at the University of Athens whose works arguably created an orthodox model of folklore text-making. Instead, though, of focusing on the orthodox metadiscourse or practices of these two central figures to the project, I will turn to their localization by a philologist engaged in the collection of vernacular forms in a Maniat village (Southern Peloponnese). The turn to local practices seeks to uncover features of orthopraxy (Blommaert 2003), that is adaptations which although guided by the orthodox model at the surface level, can be related to acts of identity, expressing resistance to hegemonic ideologies, revealing inequality in the distribution of resources or in gate-keeping restrictions.The analysis draws on the personal archives of I. Strilakos from the period 1930-35, which include three notebooks and a manuscript collection of Maniat lament verbal art. The approach of the archives is based on the examination of Strilakos’ entextualization practices, a term that refers to the way that textual ‘shape’ is given to extracted stretches of discourse (see Bauman and Briggs 1990). The systematic examination of local folklore entextualization practices sheds light on the mediated ways in which ‘authentic’ voices become indexes of nationally subsumed regional identities.

This paper addresses the complex issue of negotiating identity among minority speakers of Albanian in modern Greece as surrounded by and interacting with major societal forces and dominant ideologies stemming from the Greek nation-state. Some of the theoretical questions related to the very concept of identity are also discussed. The major thrust of the paper is focused on a discursive construction of a shifting identity formation on the part of minority community members who often anchor their identities by means of an indexical machinery rather than by explicit propositional self-identification. This means that, even though they frequently label themselves Albanian (Arvanitika) speakers and foreground various kinds of symbolic contrasts to the dominant culture and ethnicity, they also perform an identity by referring to themselves as “we” which allows more room for negotiation and for the blurring of rigid boundaries that are frequently erected around an ethnolinguistic group in our analytical jargon. I argue that this identity management is to be expected in conditions of late modernity in which no schemes, modes of existence, and ideological views are taken for granted, and in which one has to cope with challenges emerging from macro-centers of control. In such a process reflexivity at the local level looms large questioning the inherited understandings of this and related phenomena as easily classifiable sociologically and sociolinguistically.

In this paper I look at how through the use of teasing as a socially recurrent activity the members of a multilingual, multicultural and multiethnic peer group (comprised of majority Greek and minority Turkish-speaking children of Roma heritage) make particular identity ascriptions and displays salient and position themselves and others in particular ways in peer talk during break-time in an Athens primary school. Taking as a point of departure that identities are produced relationally, through systems of opposition (Barth 1969), the paper deals with how members of this school-based peer group exploit teasing as a versatile discursive device to construct one particular peer as a “poor” pupil and themselves by extension as “good” pupils in talk-in-interaction. The focus on the situated and relational construction of identity makes visible how children position themselves with regard to others in order to construct academic hierarchies. At the same time, it brings to the fore how through such positionings children may reproduce but also challenge powerful institutional discourses of academic success and failure in circulation in the classroom by negotiating identity options closer to their peer concerns. These processes of identity construction demonstrate how social selves are produced in interaction through contestation and collaboration and how identities may be simultaneously chosen and imposed through language use.

Sociolinguistic studies of ‘minority languages’ and bilingualism have increasingly moved away from a singular emphasis on issues of ethnicity that poses direct links between the use of a language and an ethnic or cultural identity towards exploring the construction of identities that are not firmly located in category-bound descriptions. In this paper, we draw on these latest insights to account for processes of identity construction in a bilingual (in Greek Cypriot and English) youth organization group based in North London. Our main data consist of the audio-recorded interactional data from a socialization outing after one of the group’s meeting but we also bring in insights from the group’s ethnographic study and a larger study of the North London Cypriot community that involved interviews and questionnaires. In the close analysis of our main data, we note a conventional association between the ‘London Greek Cypriot’ (henceforth LGC) variety that is switched to from English as the main interactional frame and a set of genres (in the sense of recurrent evolving responses to social practices) that are produced and taken up as humorous discourse: These include narrative jokes, ritual insults, hypothetical scenarios, and metalinguistic instances of mock Cypriot. We will suggest that the use of LGC demonstrates a relationship of ambivalence, a “partly ours partly theirs” status, with the participants carving out a different, third space for themselves that transcends macro-social categories (e.g. the Cypriots, the Greek-Cypriot community). At the same time, we will show how the discursive process of choosing language from a bi- or multi- lingual repertoire does not only create identities in the sense of socially and culturally derived positions but also identities (sic (dis)-identifications) in the sense of desiring and fantasizing personas.