Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 162

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

North and South: Aspects of urban linguistic practice and performance in the Greek-speaking city.

Authors: Tsiplakou, Stavroula; Sophocleous, Andry
Submitted by: Tsiplakou, Stavroula (Open University of Cyprus, Cyprus)

This thematic session aims to bring together and to discuss critically ongoing research on aspects of linguistic practice and performance that are arguably relevant to ‘city’ as the ecological context for lifestyle(s), social networks and the development of ‘urban’ sociolinguistic identities. The special focus of the panel is the Greek-speaking city and, crucially, constructs of urban ‘center’ (or urbanity qua ‘center’) and ‘periphery’ as loci of linguistic variation and identity work. The constructs of ‘center’ and ‘periphery’ are in turn viewed as mutually dependent, since the construction of peripheral , or even liminal, sociolinguistic spaces can be seen as entailing the notion of an imagined ‘center’, towards which ‘peripheral’ linguistic practices orient in different ways.

In this thematic session we wish to explore whether the urban metropolis constitutes such an imagined central sociolinguistic space in the Greek-speaking context. In this regard, we propose examining two socially and linguistically rather different capitals, Athens and Nicosia. Athens has historically been the financial and administrative center and the largest city of Greece, its population totaling more than half the population of the country due to massive internal migration since the 1970s. Nicosia, a city of 200,00 inhabitants, also historically the administrative and financial center of Cyprus, is a very different story: its Cypriot Greek and Cypriot Turkish speaking populations were segregated as early as the 1960s, and the city is divided by an UN-controlled green line/dead zone following the events of 1974. Post-1974, Nicosia has been the host of large numbers of Greek Cypriot refugees from the northern areas of Cyprus; since the 1990s, both Nicosia and Athens host large numbers of non-Greek immigrants and immigrant enclaves tend to be located in Athens’ historical center and in Nicosia’s semi-abandoned inner city, in areas close to the dead zone. Both cities are seen as ‘traumatized’, Nicosia due to its de facto division during the last 40 years, and Athens due to ongoing social upheaval as a result of the economic crisis. Athens is typically perceived as Greece’s linguistic ‘center’, since Athenian is often treated as synonymous to Standard Modern Greek, the variety which emerged as a result of dialect levelling and diglossia resolution in the 1970s (Mackridge 2009). Again, Nicosia is quite a different story: it is a dialect-speaking metropolis, as the Cypriot Greek variety (the L variety in Fergusonian terms) or, rather, varying registers thereof, including an acrolectal one that arguably displays dense code-mixing with the H variety, Standard Greek), are used in a range of domains, both public and private (Sophocleous in press; Tsiplakou et al., 2006; Tsiplakou 2009, in press). Current research (Kailoglou 2010, Theodoropoulou 2009) has shed light on local and/or subcultural linguistic practices within the urban domain (stylization of Athenian speech, Athenian and Nicosian youth slang); one of the offshoots of this research is that such practices are largely contingent upon the implied construct of an urban standard.

The thematic session then aims to address issues relating to varying constructions of the two Greek-speaking capitals as sociolinguistic ‘centers’ and the contingent construction of ‘peripheries’ and liminalities. Of particular relevance are variationist approaches to levelling and the emergence of urban koinés and linguistic features thereof (emergent variants, ‘uptalk’, politeness mechanisms, code-mixing), as well as folk linguistic perceptions of ‘city’ speech; linguistic practices and identity work within urban social networks/communities of practice, including school/youth subcultures etc.

References

Kailoglou, Eleftherios. 2010. Style and Sociolinguistic Variation in Athens. Unpblished PhD Thesis, University of Essex, U.K.

Mackridge, Peter. 2009. Language and National Identity in Greece 1766-1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sophocleous, Andry. In press. Switching code and changing social identities in face to face interaction. Sociolinguistic Studies 5(2).

Theodoropoulou, Irene. 2009. Speech style and metarepresentations: acts of social class (dis)affiliation. In Edda Weigand (ed.) Dialogue Analysis XI. Volume 2/08, 363-378. University of Münster.

Tsiplakou Stavroula. In press. Linguistic attitudes and emerging hyperdialectism in a diglossic setting: young Cypriot Greeks on their language. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistic Society 29. University of California at Berkeley.

Tsiplakou, Stavroula. 2009. Code-switching and code-mixing between related varieties: establishing the blueprint. The International Journal of Humanities 6, 49-66.

Tsiplakou, Stavroula, Andreas Papapavlou, Pavlos Pavlou & Marianna Katsoyannou. 2006. Levelling, koineization and their implications for bidialectism. In Frans Hinskens (ed.) Language Variation – European Perspectives, 265–276.Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

North and South: Aspects of urban linguistic practice and performance in the Greek-speaking city.