Language contact may produce an array of unique outcomes, from simple borrowings of vocabulary items to more substantial influences on a language’s morphology and patterns of syntax. While purists may disapprove of them, such changes serve as bold reminders that languages are ever-evolving and adaptable to the social needs and communicative strategies of their users. This paper outlines a range of such outcomes, or ‘transfers’, into Greek generated initially by Greek speakers of English in Australia (e.g., post-WWII migrants of the 1950s and 1960s from Greece and Cyprus) and perpetuated by their descendants. These transfers occur at the lexical, semantic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and pragmatic levels of language production. Code-switching between the Greek and English languages also takes place. This overall phenomenon, occasionally dubbed “Grenglish”, whereby the use of English influences the locally spoken Greek language to such an extent that its users recognise it, in certain respects and contexts, as a ‘Greek-English’ hybrid of sorts, is well attested but underexplored, especially as it relates to the second and third generations of Greek-Australian bilingual speakers.
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