• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 816

Part of Session 162: Urban linguistic practice and performance in the Greek-speaking city (Other abstracts in this session)

The spectral space of the old Megarean/Athenean dialect. Comparison with the Standard Modern Greek Koine that is spoken in Athens

Authors: Papazachariou, Dimitris
Submitted by: Papazachariou, Dimitris (University of Patras (Greece), Greece)

The aim of this paper is to present an attempt for the retrieval of the vowel system of the old dialect of Megara, which is considered as the dialect that was spoken at Athens before the koinezation of the Standard Modern Greek (SMG) (Trudgill 2003).
Archakis, Lampropoulou & Papazachariou (2009) showed that a speaker who did not use the dialect of her place of origin in her casual speech, was able to perform the dialect while imitating the speech of her parents and old neighbors while she was narrating stories from the past.
Extending this outcome, we argue that the act of performing an older version of the dialect in narrations of stories of the local past, by locals who have been exposed in this older version but do not use it in their casual speech any more, can reveal interesting information about this older form of the dialect, even allowing us to determine the spectral space of its vowel system, although it is not spoken anymore.
In particular, our study has shown that, although middle-aged and elderly locals from Megara use a vowel system of five vowels in their casual speech, in their narrations of the local past, they imitate the voice of previous locals using six vowels, confirming previous descriptions of the Old Megarean dialect (Newton 1972, Μπερναρδής 2006), about the existence of six vowels in the old dialect of Megara. Furthermore, acoustic analysis has shown that the old Megarean dialect had realizations for [i] and [a] which are different from the ones found in present day casual speech.

The proposed method allows us to formulate a reasonable hypothesis about the spectral space of the vowel system of the local dialect that was spoken in Athens before the creation of the SMG Koine, with two interesting consequences: we have the necessary information for understanding the mechanism of phonological leveling – as a linguistic mechanism to Koinezation –; furthermore, the particular data is in accordance with Trudgill’s hypothesis (2009) that the Vowel Dispersion Theory  is a result of the process of koinezation, and that further acoustic study of dialects will not support the Vowel Dispersion Hypothesis.

References:
Archakis, Argiris, Sofia Lampropoulou & Dimitris Papazachariou.  2009. 'As for the dialect, I will now tell you how we spoke at home': On the performance of dialectal talk. Journal of Greek Linguistics 9: 5 – 33.
Μπεναρδής, Μελέτιος 2006. Γραμματική και λεξικό του μεγαρικού ιδιώματος. Μέγαρα: Λύκειον των Ελληνίδων [Benardis, Meletios. 2006. Grammar and dictionary of the Megarean dialect. Megara: Lyceion of Greek Women].
Newton, B. 1972. The Generative Interpretation of Dialect: A Study of Modern Greek Phonology. Cambridge: C.U.P.
Trudgill, Peter. 2003. Modern Greek dialects: A preliminary classification. Journal of Greek Linguistics 4:45-63.
Trudgill, Peter. 2009. Greek Dialect Vowel Systems, Vowel Dispersion Theory, and Sociolinguistic Typology. Journal of Greek Linguistics 9: 165 - 182