Greek in Contact with English in Australia

Abstract

  This paper reports a sociolinguistic study of the state of Greek language in Australia as spoken by native-speaking Greek immigrants and their children. Emphasis is given to the analysis of the linguistic behaviour of these Greek Australians which are attributed to contact with English and to other environmental, social and linguistic influences. The paper discusses the non-standard phenomena in various types of inter-lingual transferences in terms of their incidence and causes and, in correlation with social, linguistic and psychological factors in order to determine the extent of language assimilation, attrition, and the content and context and medium of the language-event.
The paper also discusses the transferences from English to Greek and vice-versa from a qualitative and quantitative perspective, of the phonemic, lexical, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and prosodic deviations. During the last 170 years of settlement, Greek Australians know and use a new communicative norm with some degree of stability, the Ethnolect, (a non-standard variety of language used by an ethnic group in a static or dynamic bilingual situation) which serves their linguistic needs.