The language we were told to hide

For most of the last century, a Greek Australian who said το κάρο for the car or η μαρκέτα for the market could expect, sooner or later, to be looked down on for it. The judgement usually came from Greeks from Greece, who heard in those words a language gone wrong, and it was delivered with the confidence of people who believed there was only one proper Greek and that it was theirs. The scholar Vrasidas Karalis recorded the attitude at its most respectable, in the visiting professors who held that every foreign word to enter Greek was a corruption and a bastardisation. Most of the people who spoke these words never read that sentence, but they did not need to. They felt its weight whenever the way they spoke was treated as a mistake. I know that look, because I gave it myself: when I first heard these words, I looked down on them too.

What that judgement missed is that the people being judged were doing what speakers of every living language have always done. They arrived in a country where the fridge, the backyard, the boss and the overtime shift had English names, and they took those names into Greek and made them Greek. Το φρίτζι took a neuter article and a Greek ending. Η μαρκέτα became feminine, as a Greek market should be. A whole vocabulary of work, money, food and neighbourliness was built in a few decades by people with little formal schooling and no committee to approve it, and it was built so well that their grandchildren still use it without noticing. A language that can do that in a new country, in a single lifetime, is in good health.

The shame was real all the same, and it did damage. It taught people to keep these words for the family and to reach for a more careful Greek in company. It made the language of the diaspora something to apologise for rather than something to record, and so for decades very little of it was written down. When linguists did come to it, from Anastasios Tamis's fieldwork in Victoria to Angeliki Alvanoudi's in Cairns, they found a variety with its own rules, its own history and its own wit.

And yet the pride was there too, running underneath the shame the whole time. We saw it at the functions of The Greeklish Project, and most of all in 2015 at the Greek Centre in Melbourne, when we asked a room of Greek Australians for the words they grew up with and they shouted them back at the stage. Everyone wanted to be the tsampion, the champion of the night. Nobody in that room was apologising. We have seen the same pride in ordinary life, in the way people still greet each other with άλο ντάλι μου or χαβαγιού, knowing exactly what the words carry. Every time I hear άλο ντάλι μου, I feel a Greek yiayia is smiling at me. And now we see it online, where these words are shared and enjoyed by people who have decided they belong to them.

What has changed most is Greece. English has become the common language of the internet, of business, of music and of youth everywhere, and Greeks in Greece have begun to make their own Greeklish, writing their language in Latin letters, taking English words in and translating others across. In January 2001 the Academy of Athens issued an open letter warning against Greek written in the Latin alphabet as a threat to the language and to national identity. The linguist Jannis Androutsopoulos later described the public reaction as a moral panic, built on the same arguments once used to defend the purist katharevousa against the language people actually spoke. The practice went on regardless, as these things do.

Italian is going through the same argument under the name itanglese. Linguists writing for Treccani in 2016 counted more than 1,400 foreign words taken into Italian between 1990 and 2003, about a third of all the foreign words the language had absorbed in its history. The debate in Italy over whether this enriches the language or threatens it would sound familiar to any Italian Australian who grew up saying la fenza for the fence.

So the migrants turn out to have been early. They met English at close quarters decades before the rest of the Greek, Italian and Spanish speaking world, and they worked out how to live in it while keeping their own speech, with a grammar and a wit of their own. The varieties they built are among the oldest and most thoroughly tested records of what happens when these languages meet English, and their speakers have more experience of that meeting than anyone now arguing about it in Athens or Rome.

We are only beginning to recognise how much is there. Each of these ethnolects holds a social history that appears in no archive: what people did for work, what they ate, what they feared, what made them laugh, and what they needed a word for that their parents' language did not have. Much of it survives only in the memories of speakers now in their seventies, eighties and nineties. The scholarship is real but thin, and much of it has never been read outside a handful of university libraries.

That is why Ethnolects exists, and why it works in the open. The dictionaries name the source of every word so that no one can wave the words away as invention. They ask the communities themselves to correct the record, to name the Italian and Spanish dictionaries, and to send the words that were never written down. The shame did its work for long enough. What we owe the people who made these languages now is to write their words down properly, with their names beside them, while they can still tell us what they meant.

Send a word See the open research

Notes

Karalis, Vrasidas. Some observations on the Greek Australian cultural paradigm. Études helléniques / Hellenic Studies, p. 118. Open

Androutsopoulos, Jannis (2009). Greeklish: transliteration practice and discourse in the context of computer mediated digraphia. In A. Georgakopoulou and M. Silk (eds), Standard Languages and Language Standards: Greek, Past and Present, pp. 221 to 249. Ashgate.

Testa, Annamaria (11 April 2016). L'italiano e gli anglicismi: la Treccani fa il punto. Internazionale. Open

Tamis and Alvanoudi: see the Sources page.