Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20006509
AutoresPeter Mackridge (autor de correspondencia)
Año2009
Páginas385
Fecha de publicación2009-04-02
Open AccessNo
TipoBOOK
RevistaLanguage and national identity in Greece, 1766--1976 (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199214426.001.0001
OpenAlexW632399076
Open LibraryOL22552050M
ISBN9780199214426
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas50

This book provides a history of the great language controversy that has occupied and impassioned Greeks — sometimes with fatal results — for over two hundred years. It begins in the late 18th 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 by a desire to develop a form of Greek that expressed the Greeks' relationship to the ancients, and by the different groups'contrasting notions of what the national image so embodied should be. The purists wanted a written language 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. The book explores the political, social, and linguistic causes and effects of the controversy in its many manifestations. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from literature, language, history, and anthropology, it traces its effects on spoken and written varieties of Greek and shows its impact on those in use today. The book describes the efforts of linguistic elites and the state to achieve language standardization and independence from languages such as Turkish, Albanian, Vlach, and Slavonic. 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 twenty-five years, received blows from which it 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 from what it once aspired to be

Aesthetics · Art · Greeks · Linguistics · Literature · National identity · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Turkish · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Greece · Greek language · Greek language, modern · Intellectual life · Language and languages · Language policy · Modern Greek language · Political aspects · Political aspects of Modern greek language