An ethnolect is not slang and it is not bad grammar. It is what happens when a whole community needs words for a life its mother tongue never had to describe, and makes them from the language around it, using its own rules.

The Greek Australian who says το κάρο has not forgotten the Greek word for car. She has taken the English word, given it a neuter gender and a Greek ending, and declined it like any other Greek noun: το κάρο, του κάρου, τα κάρα. Her Italian neighbour did the same thing with the same English word in his own grammar. In the United States, Greeks said απαρέσιο for an operation and in Melbourne they said οπερέσιο, because each community heard the English around it and folded it into Greek sounds. The grammar is the mother tongue's. The raw material is English. The result belongs to neither country and entirely to the people who made it.

Three things mark these words out

They are integrated: they take gender, number and case, and verbs conjugate. They are shared: a word counts when a community uses it, not when one person does. And they are generational: the first generation made them, the second inherited them, and the third often knows them only as the words the grandparents used, which is why they need recording now.

Where the term comes from

The term was first used by the linguists Elizabeth Carlock and Wolfgang Wölck, whose 1981 study of Buffalo, New York, applied it to the English spoken by the descendants of European immigrants (Carlock and Wölck, “A method for isolating diagnostic linguistic variables: the Buffalo ethnolects experiment”, in Sankoff and Cedergren, eds, Variation Omnibus, 1981, pp. 17 to 24). It has since been used for the other direction as well: the immigrant language itself, reshaped by English. In Australia, Anastasios Tamis applied it that way to the Greek of Victoria in "The changing structure of Modern Greek: the formation of an ethnolect" (Glossologia, 1986 to 1987). Later work by Angeliki Alvanoudi in Cairns, by Theodoros Maniakas and Angela Ralli for Canada, by P. David Seaman (as reported by later writers) and Lisa Matejka-Hanser for the United States, and by the Grenglish Project for the Cypriots of London, has shown the same process at work wherever Greeks settled. The same is true of Italian in Australia and North America, and of Spanish across the English speaking world. Ethnolects documents them side by side so the pattern can be seen.

If your family spoke one of these languages, you already know the words. We are asking you to write them down before they go.