An emerging dialect of Greek? The perception of Albanian features in immigrant Greek

Rexhina Ndoci

Ohio State University

We examine here the place that the way of speaking associated with a particular ethnic group, namely Albanian immigrants in Greece, holds among Greek varieties, and we consider the question of whether the presence of Albanian-specific features have created within Greece a new dialect, to be more precise, an ethnolect of Greek.

We first provide relevant background. Albanian immigrants constitute the largest immigrant group in Greece and with a population of about half a million individuals (EL.STAT 2012) they are likely to be the ethnic group with which Greeks have had the most contact. Since Albanians started arriving in Greece in the early 1990s, they have been negatively stereotyped as “cunning, primitive, untrustworthy, dangerous people and criminals” (Lazaridis & Wickens 1999: 648) and the part of the media in this has not been negligible (Kapllani & Mai 2005). Although language shift has already been noted in the second generation of those immigrants (Gogonas 2009), imposition features from Albanian in the immigrants’ variety of Greek seem to be salient enough to be the subject of numerous online comments and jokes (cf. the Albanian-Greek entry in the mock-dictionary-style website slang.gr (2020)). Examples of imposition features are the realization of the Standard Modern Greek (SMG) velar fricative [x] as a stop [k] in words such as χωριό [xoˈɾʝo] “village”, the realization of SMG palatal stop [c] as an affricate [cç] in words such as κυρία [ciˈɾia] “Ms.”, and the shift of SMG stress from the antepenultimate to the penultimate syllable in words such as [tiˈɾopita] “cheese pie”.

The present paper makes use of the Matched Guise Technique (Lambert et al. 1960) to experimentally examine the perception of those features in the speech of Albanians that pertain to power and solidarity traits and were elicited through a pilot study. Both the evaluations of the Greeks and of the members of the Albanian community in Greece are investigated. Perception will also be examined based on words that have been stereotyped in public discourse as carrying the aforementioned Albanian features (e.g. [koˈɾʝo] for SMG [xoˈɾʝo] “village”), specifically contrasting them with words that offer the environment for the emergence of Albanian features, but have not been stereotyped (e.g. [kaˈɾa] for SMG [xaˈɾa] “joy”). This methodology will allow us an insight into the judgements listeners make about speakers who produce Albanian features and the sorts of cues listeners react to when they evaluate people based on their speech.

As for expected findings, first, we predict that speakers with Albanian features will be evaluated more negatively in power and solidarity traits than speakers who do not have such features in their speech. Second, we predict that the judgements of the members of the Albanian community will be similarly negative to the judgements of Greeks, i.e. members of the host population. Further, we hypothesize that Albanians themselves, in an attempt to deal with the negative characterizations towards their ethnic group, will be harsh in their evaluations of speakers who allow their “Albanian-ness” to show. Finally, we predict that stereotyped words carrying the features will be evaluated more negatively than non-stereotyped words with listeners reacting to the linguistic stereotyping rather than the Albanian features themselves.

As to the question of Albanian Greek as an ethnolect, it is clear that there are several features that characterize the use of Greek by Albanian immigrants. Theories of ethnolect formation (e.g. Wolck 2002) will be considered in an evaluation of how Albanian Greek measures up against other known instances of emerging ethnolects, e.g. Chicano English or Kiezdeutsch.

References

Ελληνοαλβανικά [Greek-Albanian]. In slang.gr, retrieved February 26, 2020, from https://www.slang.gr/lemma/19115-albanoellinika.

EL.STAT 2014):Demographic and social characteristics of the resident population of Greece according to the 2011 population-housing census. Retrieved February 26, 2020, from https://www.statistics.gr/en/statistics/-/publication/SAM03/-.

Gogonas, N. 2009. Language shift in second generation Albanian immigrants in Greece. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 30. 2: 95–110.

Lambert, W. E. et al. 1960. Evaluational reactions to spoken languages. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 60. 1: 44–51.

Lazaridis, G. & E. Wickens. 1999. ‘Us’ and the ‘Others’: ethnic minorities in Greece. Annals of Tourism Research 26. 3: 632–655.

Kapllani, G. & N. Mai. 2005. ‘Greece belongs to Greeks!’. The case of the Greek flag in the hands of an Albanian student. In R. King, N. Mai & S. Schwandner-Sievers (eds.), The new Albanian migration, 153–172. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press.

Wolck, W. 2002. Ethnolects — between bilingualism and urban dialect. In L. Wei, J. M. Dewaele & A. Housen (eds), Opportunities and challenges of bilingualism, 157–170. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter (Contributions to the Sociology of Language 87).