Voice in Istanbul Greek

Umut Gülsün

Boğaziçi University

The Greek community of Istanbul (Constantinopolites or the “Rums”) is an indigenous ethnoreligious group that has long existed, withstanding pressure and heavy emigration to Greece. Although the Orthodox Greek population in Turkey is now confined to Istanbul (Poli), İzmir (Smyrna), Bozcaada (Tenedos), and Gökçeada (Imbros), the Greek language was spoken throughout Asia Minor before World War I and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1924. Today, the Greek population in Istanbul is estimated to be around 2500 people (Rompopoulou 2018). Nevertheless, the Greek language continues to exist in Istanbul, with several official domains for the language. These domains include the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate situated in Fener (Phanar) with its 70 churches (Komondouros and McEntee-Atalianis 2007) around Istanbul, two community newspapers (Iho and Apoyevmatini), the Iho radio, the Istos publishing house, four junior schools, three high schools, and a nursery school (Rompopoulou 2018). However, given the highly small size of the community and various other unfavorable factors surrounding the minority languages in Turkey, Istanbul Greek could be facing the threat of language shift in its last bastion in Turkey.

This research aims at analyzing the language spoken by the Greeks of Istanbul in terms of Voice related constructions, such as anticausative and passive predicates. In these constructions, a special morphological phenomenon in Greek, namely non-active morphology, shows up on a regular basis. Hence, the usage of non-active morphology in Istanbul Greek is the main theme of this research. In order to collect data for the Istanbul dialect, I collected grammaticality judgments from speakers of Istanbul Greek based on a set of Greek sentences. Each of these sentences include two options for marking the verb: non-active morphology vs. active morphology. Moreover, each verb in question comes in four different contexts: passive, anticausative, anticausative with partial change semantics, and anticausative with total change semantics. Eventually, I could collect data for the morphological marking of 25 verbs in Istanbul Greek. In terms of demographics, all four Istanbul Greek informants that participated in this study are generations-long Istanbulites who are Greek-Turkish bilinguals. The interviews with the informants took place in their homes, work places, or public places such as cafes. All of the informants were either middle-aged or elderly. Note that this research was conducted with a small sample, and the findings can only be interpreted as tendencies.

The data collected in this research revealed differences between Standard Greek and Istanbul Greek in terms of the marking of anticausative and passive verbs. I claim that some of these differences can be attributed to language contact between Istanbul Greek and Turkish. In terms of setting the theoretical background for Voice-related constructions in Standard Greek, I utilized Alexiadou et al.’s (2015) work about Standard Greek marked/unmarked anticausatives. I also collected data on Standard Greek myself, which diverged slightly from Alexiadou et al.’s (2015) explanation of Voice-related constructions in the standard dialect. For setting the linguistic background on Istanbul Greek, I utilized the study of Pandelidis (2019). In order to offer a morphosyntactic explanation for the dialectal differences observed in the Istanbul Greek data, I utilized language contact concepts such as valency-copying (Grossman & Witzlack-Makarevich 2019), morphophonological explanations such as the presence vs. absence of the augment vowel, and Haspelmath’s (1993) spontaneity scale, among others.

References:

Alexiadou, A., Anagnostopoulou, E. & F. Schäfer. 2015. External arguments in transitivity alternations: A layering approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Grossman, E. & A. Witzlack-Makarevich. 2019. Valency and transitivity in contact: An overview. Journal of Language Contact 12: 1–26.

Haspelmath, M. 1993. More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations. In B. Comrie & M. Polinsky (eds), Causatives and transitivity, 87–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Komondouros, M. & L. J. McEntee-Atalianis. 2007. Language attitudes, shift and the ethnolinguistic vitality of the Greek Orthodox community in Istanbul. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 28. 5: 365–384.

Παντελίδης, N. 2019. Σελίδες από την ιστορία της ελληνικής γλώσσας: η περίπτωση της Κωνσταντινούπολης. Στο Α. Αρχάκης, Ν. Κουτσούκος, Γ. Ι. Ξυδόπουλος, Δ. Παπαζαχαρίου (επιμ.), Γλωσσική ποικιλία. Μελέτες αφιερωμένες στην Αγγελική Ράλλη, 453–480. Αθήνα: Κάπα Εκδοτική.

Rompopoulou, M. R. 2018. Bilingualism in younger generation of Greek Orthodox community in Istanbul: The language use of Greek and Turkish languages in Greek minority educational institutions. In P. Trifonas & T. Aravossitas (eds.), Handbook of research and practice in heritage language education. Cham: Springer (Springer International Handbooks of Education).