This is a history of the great language controversy that has
occupied and empassioned Greeks - sometimes with fatal results -
for over two hundred years. It begins in the late
eighteenth-century when a group of Greek intellectuals sought to
develop a new, Hellenic, national identity alongside the
traditional identity supplied by Orthodox Christianity. The ensuing
controversy focused on the language, fuelled on the one hand by a
desire to develop a form of Greek that expressed the Greeks'
relationship to the ancients, and on the other by the different
groups' contrasting notions of what the national image so embodied
should be. The purists wanted a writing system close to the
ancient. The vernacularists - later known as demoticists - sought
to match written language to spoken, claiming the latter to be the
product of the unbroken development of Greek since the time of
Homer. Peter Mackridge explores the political, social, and
linguistic causes and effects of the controversy in its many and
passionate manifestations. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from
literature, language, history, and anthropology, he traces its
effects on spoken and written varieties of Greek and shows its
impact on those in use today. He describes successive
language-planning policies of the state and the efforts by
linguistic elites to achieve language standardization and
independence from languages, such as Turkish, Albanian, Vlach, and
Slavonic, spoken where once Greek was dominant.
This is a timely book. The sense of national and linguistic
identity that has been inculcated into generations of Greeks since
the start of the War of Independence in 1821 has, in the last 25
years, received blows from whichit may not recover. Immigration
from Eastern Europe and elsewhere has introduced new populations
whose religions, languages, and cultures are transforming Greece
into a country quite different from what it has been and to what it
once aspired to be.
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