Greeklish and Greekness: Trends and Discourses of “Glocalness”

Abstract

Within the context of the new communication ecosystem, attitudes towards computer‐mediated discourse (CMD) practices have not been extensively investigated. This study explores social attitudes towards “Greeklish,” a specific discursive phenomenon of CMD, which involves the use of the Latin alphabet in Greek online communication. It approaches Greeklish as a glocal social practice, and investigates attitudes towards Greeklish as they are represented in the Greek press. Three main trends are identified in the corpus. The first, a retrospective trend, views Greeklish as a serious threat to the Greek language; the second, prospective trend, approaches Greeklish as a transitory phenomenon which will soon become negligible due to technological advances; the third, resistive trend, points to the negative effects of globalization and relates Greeklish to other communication and sociocultural practices. Adopting a critical discourse‐analytic perspective, this study attempts to map the discourses which permeate each one of these trends in order to reveal different, often heterogeneous and conflicting representations of Greeklish in Greek society at a specific historical moment.

Constructing Glocal Identities Through Multilingual Writing Practices on Flickr.com®

“…Wellman (2002) adopted this concept extensively in his work on social network theory and CMC, where he defined glocalization as "the combination of intense local and extensive global interaction" (p. 13). Koutsogiannis and Mitsikopoulou (2007) further applied this concept in their study of online language use in Greece in which they defined glocalization as "a dynamic negotiation between the global and the local, with the local appropriating elements of the global that it finds useful, at the same time employing strategies to retain its identity" (p. 143; for more on this, see Barton & Lee, 2011, in press). …”

The “competent child” in times of crisis: a synthesis of Foucauldian with critical discourse analysis in Greek pre-school curricula

“…The Greek text was translated into English by the authors, making sure to keep as much as possible the vocabulary, transitivity, modality and personal deixis patterns of the source text (for similar critical discourse analyses on Greek language data, see Avgitidou and Stamou (2013);Stamou (2001); see also Koutsogiannis and Mitsikopoulou (2003); Archakis and Tsakona (2010). 2 Throughout the text, we keep the sexist masculine gender for the "teacher", following the Greek original text.…”

English-Estonian code-copying in Estonian blogs

“…In these cases only material properties are copied, but not graphic properties. Th e choice of orthography might be a compromise or indicative of creativity (Androutsopoulous 2009, Koutsogiannis and Mitsikopoulou 2003) or it could be an example of language play or a joke (Vaba 2010: 64).…”