This article challenges the widely held view that a series of pervasive diachronic innovations in Cappadocian Greek owe their development to language contact with Turkish. Placing particular emphasis on its genealogical relationships with the other dialects of Asia Minor, the claim is that language change in Cappadocian is best understood when considered within a larger dialectological context. Examining the limited use of the definite article as a case in point and in comparison with parallel developments attested in Pontic and Silliot Greek, it is shown in detail that the surface similarity of the outcomes of Cappadocian innovations to their Turkish structural equivalents represents the final stages in long series of language-internal developments whose origins predate the intensification of Cappadocian–Turkish contact. The article thus offers an alternative to contact-oriented approaches and calls for a revision of accepted views on the language-internal and -external dynamics that shaped Cappadocian into its modern form.
Cappadocian Greek is an extreme case of language change and dialectal variation among the Modern Greek dialects in having lost the tripartite grammatical gender distinction into masculine, feminine and neuter nominals, a distinction operative in Greek since its earliest recorded stages. In this paper, I argue that this linguistic innovation should not be viewed exclusively as the result of language contact with Turkish, as is most commonly assumed in the literature, but rather as the result of a series of language‐internal analogical levellings of gender mismatches in polydefinite constructions, a process most probably accelerated by language contact but certainly not triggered by it.
AimTo investigate whether the positive attitudes towards Standard Modern Greek and the mixture of positive and negative attitudes towards Cypriot Greek that have been documented in Cyprus are also present in London's Greek Cypriot community.
ApproachUnlike previous quantitative works, the study reported in this article was qualitative and aimed at capturing the ways in which attitudes and attitude-driven practices are experienced by members of London's diasporic community.
Data and AnalysisData were collected by means of semi-structured, sociolinguistic interviews with 28 members of the community. All participants were second-generation heritage speakers, successive bilinguals in Cypriot Greek and English, and successive bidialectal 2 speakers in Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek. The data were analysed qualitatively (thematic analysis).
WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch From village talk to slang: the re-enregisterment of a nonstandardised variety in an urban diaspora Karatsareas, P.
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