Skewed Sociolinguistic Awareness of a Native Non-standard Dialect: Evidence from the Cypriot Greek Writing of Greek Cypriot Students

Abstract

Over the last 50 years, sociolinguistic research in settings in which a regional, social, or ethnic non-standard linguistic variety is used alongside the standard variety of the same language has steadily increased. The educational implications of the concomitant use of such varieties have also received a great deal of research attention. This study deals with regional linguistic variation and its implications for education by focusing on the Greek Cypriot educational context. This context is ideal for investigating the linguistic profiles of speakers of proximal varieties as the majority of Greek Cypriots are primarily educated in just one of their varieties: the standard educational variety. The aim of our study was to understand Greek Cypriot primary school pupils’ sociolinguistic awareness via examination of their written production in their home variety [Cypriot Greek (CG) dialect]. Our assumption was that, because written production is less spontaneous than speech, it better reflects pupils’ conscious awareness. Pupils were advised to produce texts that reflected their everyday language with family and friends (beyond school boundaries). As expected, students’ texts included an abundance of mesolectal features and the following were the ten most frequent: (1) palato-alveolar consonants, (2) future particle [ená] and conditional [ítan na] + subjunctive, (3) consonant devoicing, (4) CG-specific verb stems, (5) final [n] retention, (6) [én/ éni] instead of [íne], (7) CG-specific verb endings, (8) [én/é] instead of [ðen], (9) elision of intervocalic fricative [ɣ], and (10) CG-specific adverbs. Importantly, in addition to the expected mesolectal features that reflect contemporary CG, students included a significant and unexpected number of basilectal features and instances of hyperdialectism (that are not representative of today’s linguistic reality) which rendered their texts register-inappropriate. This led us to conclude that Greek Cypriot students have a skewed sociolinguistic awareness of variation within their first dialect and a distorted impression of their own everyday language. We argue that the portrayal of CG in its basilectal form was performed intentionally by students in an effort to distance themselves from a socially constructed identity of a rural, uneducated, and stigmatized non-standard-dialect speaker. The study is of international relevance as it deals with sociolinguistic issues that pertain to all bidialectal speakers.

A curious case of Cyprus: is minority discourse eligible?

“…Once regarded a vulgar type of speech, not worthy of literary presence, it was, and still is, the actual insular mother tongue, the first variant of Modern Greek learnt by Greek Cypriots (Papapavlou 1998, Pavlou, Papapavlou 2004). The standard Modern Greek is therefore to some extent an "outsider" language, not entirely foreign, but indeed a troublesome variety, although taught in schools (Terkourafi 2001, Ayiomamitou, Yiakoumetti 2017, Michalska 2014. Naturally, a certain tension is produced between these two varieties as one is dominant while the other is generic 3 .…”

Eliciting Big Data From Small, Young, or Non-standard Languages: 10 Experimental Challenges

“…For example, in the Greek Cypriot community, people use Standard Greek in the written modality in formal contexts. When writing occurs in the home variety, first it is highly restricted to informal communication, second it takes place through instant messaging applications or social media platforms, and third it reveals a highly inconsistent use of the roman alphabet (Themistocleous, 2010; Ayiomamitou and Yiakoumetti, 2017). As Armosti et al (2014, p. 23) highlight, the need for codification is evident as there is a range of situations where people “choose to or must write in Cypriot Greek, and hence are inevitably faced with the quandary of how to write in this non-codified variety.”…”

Teachers’ language use in United Kingdom Chinese community schools: Implications for heritage-language education

“…instances of shuttling between teachers’ and learners’ first dialect and the target second dialect ( Battisti et al, 2011 ; Malcolm and Truscott, 2012 ; Ayiomamitou and Yiakoumetti, 2017 ), and…”

“…1. instances of shuttling between teachers' and learners' first language and the target second/foreign language (Kharma and Hajjaj, 1989;Duff and Polio, 1990;Franklin, 1990;Polio and Duff, 1994;Rolin-Ianziti and Brownlie, 2002;Yiakoumetti and Mina, 2013b;Narayan and Kuar, 2022), 2. instances of shuttling between teachers' and learners' first dialect and the target second dialect (Battisti et al, 2011;Malcolm and Truscott, 2012;Ayiomamitou and Yiakoumetti, 2017), and 3. establishing links between crosslinguistic educational practices and student learning and performance (Yiakoumetti, 2006(Yiakoumetti, , 2007Then and Ting, 2011;Lucas and Yiakoumetti, 2019).…”