Grenglish: New understandings of the linguistic varieties of the British Greek Cypriot diaspora

We present findings from the Grenglish Project, a public engagement initiative that brought together members of the UK’s Greek Cypriot diaspora in a crowdsourcing effort to document linguistic material that reflected the community’s linguistic history. This presentation examines British Greek Cypriot understand and view their own community’s linguistic variety. The material submitted to the project website (https://www.grenglish.org/) include English loanwords that were integrated into the morphological system of Cypriot Greek by the addition of native derivational and inflectional suffixes (πάσον /páson/ ‘bus’ and πασέρης /paséris/ ‘bus driver’) and phonological adaptations of placenames of significance to the UK’s Greek Cypriot community (Φίσμπουρι Ππάρκ/Fishbury Park ‘Finsbury Park’). These widely used morphological and phonological adaptations, typically labelled Grenglish, are collectively recognised as a key part of a new linguistic variety unique to the UK’s Cypriot Greek speakers and indexical of the language, history and heritage of UK’s Greek Cypriot migrant community (Gardner-Chloros 1992, Papapavlou & Pavlou 2001). However, material contributed to the Grenglish website also included Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek terms, as well as puns and wordplay and even adaptations of Cypriot Greek words to English morphology (Karatsareas & Charalambidou forthcoming). Consequently, the boundaries between UK Cypriot Greek, Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek seems to be fuzzy and are explicitly contested by our informants. We consider the implications of the project’s findings for the status of British Cypriot Greek as a variety on its own right and address the ideological and attitudinal factors that shape the prospects for its intergenerational transmission.
Keywords: diasporic languages, UK Cypriots, morphological adaptation, language attitudes, Grenglish
References:
Gardner-Chloros, Penelope. 1992. ‘The Sociolinguistics of the Greek-Cypriot Community of London’. In Plurilinguismes 4: Sociolinguistique Du Grec et de La Grèce, edited by Marilena Karyolemou, 112–36. Paris: Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches en Planification Linguistique.
Karatsareas, Petros and Charalambidou, Anna (2021) ‘Exploring linguistic hybridity and lexical creativity in the UK’s Greek Cypriot diaspora: the Grenglish project’. Cahiers du Centre d’Études Chypriotes , No. 50 (2020). pp. 431-456. ISSN 0761-8271
Papapavlou, Andreas, and Pavlos Pavlou. 2001. ‘The Interplay of Language Use and Language Maintenance and the Cultural Identity of Greek Cypriots in the UK’. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 11 (1): 92–113.