Language and Identity in Greece

(1900-1976)
Dr. Notis Toufexis
nt262@cam.ac.uk
www.toufexis.info

Paper Gr.3
Introduction to Modern Greek Language
and Culture
National identity
• What is (national) identity?

• What or who people think they are

• What or who people say they are

• What or who people aspire to be

Manipulation of national identity
• When national border are not fixed, people are not
born Greek but may become Greek

• National identity and language can not differ

• Can a ʻHelleneʼ (Έλλην) speak Bulgarian or Slav?

 Expansion
Source: Wikipedia Commons
of the Modern Greek state
 (National) Identity:
From an idealized and mythicized past to the present (and the
imagined future)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Detail of the Akropolis by painter Leo von Klenze
(1784 - 1864)(Reconstruction of the Acropolis and
Areus Pagus in Athens, 1846)
View of Athens from the river Ilissos, watercolor,
Johann Michael Wittmer (1833)
Acropolis from the top of Polis Grand Hotel
 Ancient Greece

Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium)

Ottoman Empire (Tourkokratia)

Modern Greek State (Kingdom of the Hellenes)

The myth of Ancient Greece
incorporated into modern Greek ideology
“Hellenism, as a cultural topos […] was an intellectual
product of the Renaissance, which was subsequently
renovated through intellectual trends ranging from
the Enlightenment to the Romanticism …

… the incorporation of antiquity constitutes not

simply the beginning of the national narrative, but
actually the construction of the object of this
narrative. For Greeks, to feel as national subjects
means to internalize their relationship with Ancient
Greece.”
A. Liakos, “Hellenism and the Making of Modern Greece: Time, Language, Space”, in K. Zacharia (ed.), Hellenisms. Culture, Identity, and
Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity, London 2008, p. 205
 Ancient Greece

Modern Greek State (Kingdom of the Hellenes)

Greek language and language
controversy
• The debate about Modern Greek history and identity
is very much a language controversy

• The ʻLanguage Questionʼ is about developing a

written language that would reflect an ideal national
image

• This image has to embody and express the

relationship of the modern Greeks to the ancients
“Another important factor, somewhat paradoxical in its
impact, is the tradition of neoclassicism in most
European countries. The great prestige of Greek
antiquity and its culture, whose products are
considered by the intellectuals of all European
countries as being of universal value, reproduces a
discourse that in its positive mentions of Greece pays
tribute solely to classical antiquity and its civilization.
Reference to this great prestige, in almost every
positive mention of modern Greece, functions in fact
as a pejorative euphemism through the implied
contrast between the glorious past and the
insignificant present.”

A. Frangoudaki, ʻDiglossia and the language situation in Greece: a sociological approach to the interpretation of Diglossia and
some hypotheses on todayʼs realityʼ, Language in Society 21: 365–81 (this quote on page 376)
 Language:
Modern and Ancient (not Old) Greek

Latin Greek (Ancient)

Language

change
Vernacular 1
Vernacular 2 Vernacular 3 Greek (Modern)

Latin Old French French Old Greek

Is there one Greek language?
• “Greek” as a linguistic label is multifaceted

• A schism between the spoken and written language

is nothing new for the Greek speaking world

• The use of different registers with variable (old and

new) morphosyntactic features is common in the
Medieval and Early Modern period
Linguistic choices and ideology
• After the creation of the Greek state in the 1830ʼs the
“Quest” for a written standard intensifies

• How this standard would look like is heavily

influenced by ideology
From a 1906 reading book Textbook of Papamarkos for second
class pupils
 αλεπού

ἀλώπηξ

A choice is made based on entrenched beliefs about

language: only with the “right” language the speaker
can be moral, civilized, rational, and capable of
abstract thought
A sociolinguistic perspective: Diglossia
• An elevated code with no native speakers is used as
a written standard and not as a vernacular (at least
not in a casual way)

• This code is superposed upon the everyday

vernacular

• These two codes are conventionally labeled as HIGH

and LOW respectively
 HIGH

Dichotomy: Acquisition, Function, Typology

LOW
HIGH and LOW represent the two poles of a continuum

HIGH LOW

A large amount of variation exists between these two

poles.
“K[atharevousa] ... is mostly a written code, which
emulates in vocabulary and in grammatical elements
Ancient Greek. As the official language of the state, it
has been the language of public administration, the
church, politics, and part of science. D[emotiki], on
the other hand, is the codified and normalized form of
the “natural” language; in linguistic terms, it is the
standardized variety that corresponds to the
fundamental features of Modern Greek, that is, to the
productive linguistic mechanisms, morpho-
phonological and syntactic ...”

Frangoudaki 1992: 366

“Although a large segment of the literature on the
Greek sociolinguistic situation maintains the contrary,
Demotiki is not a vernacular, or a dialect, or a variety.
It is in fact a standard. It is the product of a process
of codification and normalization of the spoken
language, out of the varieties used by the educated
in the urban centers. This process occurred
approximately between the 1880s and 1930s.”

A. Frangoudaki, “Comment. Greek societal bilingualism of more than a century”, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 157
(2002) 102.
 Katharevousa is artificial
“... a striking comparison between the demotic and
katharévousa versions of the phrase ʻMy father diedʼ:
while the demotic version (Πέθανε ο πατέρας μου)
takes root in oneʼs heart, in oneʼs very being, ..., the
katharévousa version (ἀπέθανεν ὁ ἐμὸς πατήρ) is
like a piece of clothing that can be discarded. The
demotic version ʻhas grown organically as the green
branch of our national linguistic treeʼ, while the
katharévousa version is ʻthe dead branch . . . , which
has been nailed to the linguistic trunk by willpower
aloneʼ.”
Mackridge 2009: 256
 Language and Greek nationalism (1888)
Οι ξένες λέξεις κανένα κακό δε μʼ έκαμαν· τις
έχω μαλιστα ανάγκη για να πω πολλά πράγματα
που δε μʼ έρχεται και δε γίνεται να τα πω αλλιώς·
έτσι τις έκαμα δικές μου ... Είναι περιττό να
καθαρίσουμε τη γλώσσα που δεν τόχει ανάγκη
και δε βρωμά· κάλλια να καθαρίσουμε την
Ανατολή.
Ψυχάρης, Το ταξίδι μου, ed. A. Angelou, Athens: Ermis (first publication 1888) (p. 181)
Language and Greek nationalism (1908)
“the aim of the dictionary was to demonstrate that Greek had
been spoken constantly through the ages, that there had
always been a Greek nation that spoke it, and that the
changes that had taken place in the language did not
constitute corruption and barbarization but ʻa natural and
necessary developmentʼ that conformed to laws that are
essential to every living spoken language. It also aimed to
show that the Greeks are a single nation from Agamemnon
to George I and from the Caucasus to Italy, and that they
worship one God and possess one fatherland and one
language.”

# P. Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976, Oxford 2009: 273
 Expansion • Source: Wikipedia
of the Modern Greek state Commons
Language and religion: the translation(s)
of the Gospels
• Queen Olga of Greece
(1851-1926, Wife of King
George I of Greece)
commissioned a translation of
the Gospels in the simple
language (“for popular use”)
(1898), published 1901
Olgaʼs
translation Original
• Τοῦ δὲ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἡ • Τοῦ δὲ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἡ
γέννησις ἔγεινε γέννησις οὕτως ἦν.
κατ᾽αὐτὸν τὸν τρόπον. μνηστευθείσης γὰρ τῆς
ἀφοῦ δηλαδὴ μητρὸς Αὐτοῦ Μαρίας τῷ
Ἰωσὴφ, πρὶν ἢ συνελθεῖν
ἠρραβωνίσθη ἡ μήτηρ
αὐτοὺς, εὑρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ
Αὐτοῦ Μαρία μὲ τὸν ἔχουσα ἐκ Πνεύματος
Ἰωσὴφ, πρὶν συνέλθουν, Ἁγίου.
εὑρέθη ἔγκυος μὲ τὴν
δύναμιν τοῦ Ἁγίου
Πνεύματος.
Why the translation?
• Benevolent intentions, based on the experience of
the post 1897 war period

• The publication was a success, controversy about

the publication was short-lived
One more translation as a political
statement

•“The Gospel in the

language of the people”
•Translation presented
falsely as the continuation of
the Queenʼs translation

• The front page of the Akropolis newspaper, Sunday 9,

September 1901.
A deliberate act against the linguistic
establishment
• Author or the translation was Alexandros
Pallis (1851-1935)

• The object of the serialization, as the

proprietor of the Akropolis put it, was to
propagate to its countless readers the
preaching of Christ, which until today
was sealed with a multiple of seals

• The register used for the translation

made no concessions to tradition
 Who amongst the peasants and the workers, who
even among the merchants and the clerks and all
those who have not completed secondary education
can understand the language of the Gospels? No one.
[...]

Rarely, perhaps for the first time, has the vernacular

language taken on such a godlike gentleness and
sweetness and harmoniousness as in the language of
Mr Pallis. It is as though one is listening to the tinkling
of the bells of a distant flock, such as those that first
greeted the Birth of Christ.
From the editorial of K. Gavriilidis, the editor of Akropolis (Mackridge 2009: 249)
The establishment reacted violently
• Three days of violent riots
followed between large crowds,
and armed troops

• 8 people died as a consequence

• The bishop of Athens had to

resign and eventually the
government of Prime Minister
Theotokis fell too.
The significance of the incident
• The Language Question irrevocably entered the
political arena

• Dimotiki could now be associated with attacks on

Orthodox Christianity

• Translating the Gospels equals admitting that the

language of the Gospels is no longer comprehensible

• The narrative of continuity is broken

 Ancient Greece

Modern Greek State (Kingdom of the Hellenes)

National ideology with immense time
gaps?
• The myth of reborn Phoenix (resurrected Hellas) was
to weak to sustain a national ideology

• It excluded the religious part of present experience

 Hellenism and identity: a genealogy

Ancient Hellenism father great-great grandfather

Macedonian Hellenism son great grandfather

Christian Hellenism grandson grandfather

Medieval Hellenism great-grandson father

Modern Hellenism great-great-grandson son

Language as a uniting factor
• The idea of “One” Greek language plays an integral
role in this narrative
According to this ideology, what is labeled with the
timeless and semantically vague abstract term
Hellenism together with its language is a healthy
organism that for 4.000 years has either resisted or
assimilated foreign influences; alteration is viewed as
adulteration, while outside influences are generally
viewed as threats.

P. Mackridge, “Cultural Difference as National Identity in Modern Greece”, in Zacharia 2008: 303
Thou shalt not translate
• Translation of the Gospels and other “holy texts” is
seen as an unpatriotic act

• The translation is associated with foreign influences

• The fear of a pan-Slavist conspiracy with the aim of

splitting the Greek nation into dialects and cutting
the Greek off from their ancestral culture
Language and the Macedonian Question
• The intense phase of the “Macedonian Struggle”
lasted from 1904-1908

• The Greek authorities tended to count as “Greeks” all

those who adhered to the Patriarchate of
Constantinople and sent their children to Greek
schools

• The Bulgarians tended to classify as “Bulgarian” all

those who spoke a Slav language as their mother
tongue
Source: Wikimedia commons
Both sides believed, however, that if the inhabitants of Macedonia were
taught to read and write Greek (or Bulgarian), they would automatically gain
access to Greek (or Bulgarian) national culture and history, would share the
same feelings and thoughts as the rest of the Greeks (or Bulgarians), would
consequently adopt a Greek (or Bulgarian) consciousness, and would feel an
adherence to the Greek (or Bulgarian) national cause. The question for the
Greek authorities was which kind of Greek to teach them. Only Ancient
Greek and katharevousa were being taught in Greek schools in Macedonia
at the time, as they were in Greece itself. Demoticists observed that in Greek
schools Slav-speaking and Vlach-speaking children were attempting to learn
to read Ancient Greek and katharvousa without being able to communicate in
spoken Modern Greek; they also observed that many children preferred to
attend Bulgarian schools because they found written Bulgarian easier to
learn, since the vocabulary and grammar of the written language
corresponded closely to the spoken, and it employed a more or less phonetic
orthography.
Mackridge 2009: 255
Educational demoticism and the
dilemma of purity
• Once “liberated” those living in the Ottoman empire
and elsewhere can be educated and integrated in the
Modern Greek nation with the help of demotic

• Winning the hearts and minds of speakers of other

languages is more important than trying to sustain a
link to the past

• However, regional dialects have to abolished and a

supra-regional, standardized variety has to be
created
Unfortunately the idea that it would be possible for
the demotic language, as it has been handed down
to us through oral tradition, to enrich itself from its
own resources and to develop into a modernized
language of a civilized people, at the same time
preserving all its virginal demotic chastity, has proved
to be romantic and impracticable.
N. Andriotis, 1932 (Mackridge 2009: 248)
The trial of the accents
• In November 1941 the vice chancellor accused a young
professor of the University of Athens of “criminal activity
against the nation, which threatens to bring about a rift in
national opinion and dangerous commotion”

• The professor, Yannis Kakridis, had published two small

books on ancient Greek culture, written in demotic and
printed in the monotonic (single-accent) system

• Kakridis was punished with two monthʼs temporary

suspension
Foreign occupation as chance for the
resurrection of the Ancients
• The modern convention of moving the Olympic
Flame via a relay system from Olympia to the
Olympic venue began with the 1936 Summer
Olympics in Berlin, Germany.

Source: Wikipedia
During the proceedings, Koukoules read out the
transcript of a programme recently broadcast by
Berlin radio about the way that professors, writers,
journalists, and other intellectuals in Germany were
working to adjust German cultural life according to
ancient Greek models; he was clearly implying that
this was what should have been happening in
Greece too.
Mackridge 2009: 308
A more modern concept of identity

Language and identity in Modern Greek literature

The concept of Eλληνικότητα
• Ελληνικότητα unifies the differences between the
exceptionality of the past and the normality of the
present

• Greece or Hellas becomes a metaphor or even a

quest, almost a vision

• Specifics of the present and the past are combined to

evoke an organic, synthetic and metaphoric value of
infinite importance
 Dear friends, it has been granted to me to write in a
language that is spoken only by a few million people. But a
language spoken without interruption, with very few
differences, throughout more than two thousand five
hundred years. This apparently surprising spatial-temporal
distance is found in the cultural dimensions of my country.
Its spatial area is one of the smallest; but its temporal
extension is infinite. If I remind you of this, it is certainly not
to derive some kind of pride from it, but to show the
difficulties a poet faces when he must make use, to name
the things dearest to him, of the same words as did Sappho,
for example, or Pindar, while being deprived of the audience
they had and which then extended to all of human
civilization.

O.Elytis, The Nobel Lecture (1979) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1979/elytis-lecture-e.html

Binary distinctions or hybridity?
• Greek culture can indeed be seen as a hybrid
construct that did not emerge from the synthesis of
opposites but from the tensions between East and
West, Enlightenment and Orthodoxy, Antiquity and
Tourkokratia.

• Modern Greek literature is not so much a literature of

time as of place; it developed out of the dialogue
between places, languages and cultures.

D. Tziovas, Beyond the Acropolis: Rethinking Neohellenism, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 19 (2001): 205 & 211
A synchronic perspective
• The language question has been solved and demotic
has been established as a standard

• In recent years, a metalinguistic prophecy of

language decline has received widespread
acceptance

• The answer against language decline: more

teaching of Ancient Greek
Identity crisis in a globalized world?
• European integration is perceived as a vague and
confused threat

• Greek intellectual groups perceive the national

identity as needing to be defended

• The “myth” or the uniqueness of the Greek language

is extremely popular among politicians and amateur
linguists
Urban legend: Hellenic Quest
Hellenic Quest refers to an urban legend mostly praising the
Greek Language for its superiority amongst all languages. The
hoax circulated around Greek websites and was widely
reproduced without verification by many reputable sources from
newspapers to the then Minister for National Education and
Religious Affairs ... According to the "Hellenic Quest" story, CNN
has reported that Apple Computer is supposedly developing a
software product for teaching the Ancient Greek language to
foreigners and scientists, in the light of the upcoming development
of supercomputers that will use Ancient Greek as their
programming interface, due to this language's superior logical
structure. (This prediction often attributed by the hoax writer to Bill
Gates) A prototype computer that is allegedly under development
as part of this project is called "Ibycus".
Source: Wikipedia
Ideology as metalanguage
However, we should highlight the importance of the impact on
Greek society of the historical language question. Besides its
effects on language itself, particularly on the lack of any in-
depth study of actual language usage, it is responsible for the
absence in the society (even among scholars and especially
among educators) of the elementary knowledge concerning
what is a language and how it functions. This lack, which leads
to the treatment of traditional (prescientific) opinions on
language as self-evidently valid, validates at the same time the
confusion among traditional and modern ideas and notions.
That is to say, the few remaining supporters of K language
have modernized their arguments by using notions from
linguistic theory.
Frangoudaki 1992: 375-376