Language Contact between English and Greek in Australia.

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.

References

Alexiadou, A. 2017. Building Verbs in language mixing varieties. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 36(1): 165-192.

Bentahila, A. and Davies, E.E. 1992. Code-switching and Language Dominance. Advances in Psychology 83: 443-458.

Broersma, M. and de Bot, K. 2006. Triggered Code-switching: A corpus-based evaluation of the original triggering hypothesis and a new alternative. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 9(1): 1-13.

Clyne, M. 1991. Community Languages. The Australian Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clyne, M. 2003. Dynamics of Language Contact: English and Immigrant Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tamis, A. 2010. Greek Language and Culture in Australia. In A.M. Tamis, C.J. Mackie, and S. Byrne (eds). Philathenaios. Studies in honour of Michael J. Osborne. Athens: Greek Epigraphic Society.