Aspects of dialectal phraseology:

The case of the Greek idioms of the mountain region of Thesprotia and of South Albania

Eleni Bantiou¹ & Doris K. Kyriazis²

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki^{1, 2}

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the field of dialectal phraseology, which is examined within the scope of language contact and Balkan linguistics. Except for the diachronic aspect of the phraseological units, we focused on their diatopic aspect and their spread in certain geographical areas, where they are mostly, or even strictly known. In the light of contact linguistics, we examine phraseological material of the Greek idioms of South Albania and of the mountain region of Thesprotia. The collection of the phraseological material was based on indexing phraseological units from the literary work of T. Kotsias and S. Dimitriou, who systematically use the dialectal variation in their writings. More phraseological units of the local idioms were added, deriving from work concerning the region of Εpirus. A comparison of the gathered material with the available, corresponding phraseological units coming from the Albanian language was made afterwards. The study highlights a series of phraseological equivalents between the two linguistic varieties, which are the result of the language contact between Greek speaking and Albanian speaking populations of this specific geographic, as well as linguistic area. The consistency of the phraseological units leads us to the conclusion that we can interpret a large part of the dialectal phraseological material, which remains opaque within the range of Greek, by shedding light on the neighboring language.

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