Last Updated on April 18, 2021 by themigrationnews
“Modern Greek in Diaspora: An Australian Perspective”(2018) is a narrative, descriptive and qualitative study conducted by Angeliki Alvanoudi. This book underscores the fact that migration is not just relocation or movement of people from a place of origin to a place of destination. But migration is also about the transfer, amalgamation, exchange of cultures and languages in the place of destination. Angeliki Alvanoudi, a post-doctoral linguistics scholar at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece undertook this research of exploring the extent of the Greek language being spoken by the immigrant Greek communities in Cairns in Australia. Alvanoudi delves deeply into how the earlier Greek immigrants, that is first-generation immigrants spoke in Greek within Australia, but with time there has been borrowing of language from English into the Greek language (among the second and third-generation immigrants). Through this study, Alvanoudi not only presented a breakthrough study on migration that is solely based on qualitative methods, but it is also the first proper study that has been conducted on the Greek diaspora in Australia. Her study thus opened up new possibilities for future research in the domain of migration and linguistics.
The sequencing of topics in the book is lucid and explicit. This book has a total of six chapters that deal with several aspects of Greek and English linguistics. With each chapter having its own separate introduction and conclusion. In the first chapter, titled -“Chapter 1: Introduction”, where she highlights the past studies conducted on the Greek diaspora in the UK, USA, and other parts of the world. Within this chapter, the author then discusses the history of migration about how World War II and the Greek Civil War had affected the Greek population, and why the Greek settlers chose to leave their own country and migrated and settled in Australia around 1829 and 1974. This chapter also discusses the type of migration from Greek to Australia, a labor-induced migration, that comprised of both unskilled male and female workers with no prior knowledge of English migrating to Australia. And at the same time, the author tried to explore and understand the linguistic changes over time in terms of migration.
Alvanoudi for her research study, first of all, selected the three generations of immigrants. First-generation are Greeks, who migrated to Australia from Greece in their adolescence. The second-generation are Greeks who migrated to Australia in their pre-school years. The third-generation are Greeks who were born in Australia to the second-generation people. Data for the study were collected from the first-generation Greeks aged from 50 to 90 years, with a sample size of 30. As well as from the second-generation Greeks aged from 40 to 80 years with a sample size of 15. Whereas data were not collected from the third-generation. Because the third-generation immigrants mostly comprised of young children and teenage population and they had very little or no knowledge of Greek (due to more interaction with the English-speaking world/community of Australia). For the research methodology, qualitative techniques such as – Participant Observation were applied; then, Self-Reports of participants were taken into account; Content Checking Techniques were also used along with 23 hours of Audio Recordings and 2 hours of Video Recordings of the participants in order to obtain the “real-life language data” (by real-life language data, the author meant that – by directly conversing with the Greek immigrants she will be able to collect the most needed primary data, that is free of bias and errors, for the study of linguistics and the role played by migration in shaping up a language).
Chapter 2: Borrowing and Contact-Induced Change
The second chapter discusses the changes in Greek due to English. These changes in Greek are majorly due to lexical borrowings, loanwords, and loan shifts. These borrowings result from an intense, and active communication of the third–generation immigrants with English-speaking people in Australia, where English is the dominant language.
Chapter 3: Mixing Codes
The third chapter discusses the mixing of codes/code-mixing, which are a common feature of Greek conversation in Australia. The participants do insert certain English words while conversing in Greek, but these additions of English words do not change the meaning of Greek sentences, as these words do not have meaning. These inserted words generally include English adjectives, verbs, noun phrases, prepositional phrases, nouns, and adverbs. Alvanoudi denotes these inserted words into the Greek language led to the formation of bilingual compound verbs. Furthermore, Alvanoudi also talks about the “pragmatic marker” words that are found in the English language, such as: actually, almost, basically, and because. These words are generally used to open and close speeches or express the attitude of the speaker. Furthermore, these same words were later also used in Greek as pragmatic markers, thus creating hybrid structures in Greek conversation.
Chapter 4: Conversational Code Switching
The fourth chapter deals with the general interaction of immigrants and the underlying reasons why the immigrants switch to English while speaking in Greek. Alvanoudi from her conversation excerpts (provided in both English and Greek versions) highlights the reasons, why the participants switch languages. These reasons are a selection of the next speaker, pursuing response of recipient, accomplishing actions that invoke asymmetry between speaker and hearer, closing or opening of sequences, reporting direct speech, making strong positive assessments, delivering new information, redoing the second pair parts, showing disagreement with the prior speaker, and lastly dealing with the possible trouble in hearing or understanding any word or sentence.
Chapter 5: Participant – Related Code Switching
The fifth chapter discusses how the preference of participants and speakers switches from Greek to English, or English to Greek depending on their competency in one language and incompetency in another language. Through excerpts of conversations between participants that highlight in which language the participants had competence, it was found that the first-generation immigrants had problems in switching to English while conversing in Greek. However, those participants did use one or two English words without knowing their meaning and they repeatedly used the same English words in conversation with Alvanoudi, so as to receive the correct word or confirmation (from Alvanoudi) that they have spoken it correctly. Whereas in the case of second-generation, they have more competence over English, but they do struggle to find Greek words while conversing in Greek.
Chapter 6: What Can We Conclude?
The sixth chapter deals with the findings from the study and basically summarizes the entire study along with clearly underlining the social factors, that help immigrants to maintain their language within their community. These factors include marital status, friendships, education, religion, employment, and generation.
Alvanoudi gives here detailed evidence of all those social factors (mentioned above), such as – in the case of generations, the first-generation and second-generation immigrants used their native language to converse in daily life as compared to the third-generation. Then, in marital status, endogamous marriages were practiced as such marriages will lead to less induced changes in the minority language. In terms of family, both nuclear and joint families promoted the maintenance of language and in the case of friends, it was observed that first-generation immigrants used to make friends or created network ties with people from their own ethnic background. Apart from that media in Cairns is also helping in maintaining the language as news reports, current affairs and other television shows are being broadcasted in Greek.
But at the same time, the study also highlights how English being the predominant language has become one of the most important and driving factors of upward social mobility. Furthermore, it was also found over time, that conversing in Greek became seriously limited among the third-generation as compared to the first-generation people, to which Alvanoudi predicts that if this continues then slowly the Greek language will lose to English in terms of maintenance.
Furthermore, limitations of this study have been observed and they are – firstly, the participant observation approach used in the study does not provide any other research techniques to deal with the error of Observer’s Paradox, as Alvanoudi has also mentioned in the book that while doing her audio and video recordings, she did not interrupt her participants which might lead to a different type of code-switching. Secondly, the structural aspects of how there is a convergence between English and Greek have been depicted. Still, it remains very hard to comprehend the nuances of linguistics, which are acknowledged by Alvanoudi as well. Thirdly, there has been no discussion whether there is any effect of borrowing or switching in terms of English being influenced by Greek. Lastly, the study had been conducted only in Cairns, so the results of the Greek diaspora, maintenance, and borrowing of linguistics cannot be generalized for all those Greek diasporas living in different parts of Australia.
Lastly, it can be concluded that the overall lucidity and comprehensibility of this study on Greek diaspora makes it a brilliantly written book which makes it important academic reading for any scholar who is interested in migration, diaspora, and linguistic studies and specifically for those who want to study/understand the usage of qualitative techniques in migration studies, history of migration and struggle of immigrant people to preserve their ethnicity through language and culture.
Richa Kundu, Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL), Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom.