 Welcome to this week's University's Department of the Seminar. I'll speak today as Pedro Scalazareas from the very close by, the University of Westminster. And he's going to talk to us about Cypriot Greek in London. Thank you. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's really nice to be here just from the corner for both home and work. We're here in the centre of London. So, today I'm going to give you some findings from a research initiative that started in 2013, looking at Cypriot Greek as a community or heritage language here in London. So, this project started in 2015 with a British Academy of Postdoctoral Fellowship that I was awarded to investigate the development of heritage grammars in present day London, looking at Cypriot Greek in particular. Then in 2015 I moved to my current institution, the University of Westminster, where I was very lucky and grateful to receive a further funding to complete the project that I started in 2015 by putting together a corpus of spoken British Cypriot Greek. Last year I was also awarded a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award to start working on how we could communicate the findings of this research to a wider audience outside academia. And currently we are working by women, me and my research assistant, Alexandra, you'll use over there at the back. We're currently working on a project on attitudes towards Cypriot Greek and standard model Greek among London's Greek Cypriot community and we're looking particularly at the role of Greek supplementary schools. And this summer we're going to start another project with a colleague from the University of Cyprus, Eleanor Nivu, looking particularly at Greek-speaking Turkish Cypriots in London. So this is, I'm telling you all this to show that the data that you'll see today come from a wide range of different projects centered around different aspects of London's Greek Cypriot community and its language and languages. So today I want to situate Cypriot Greek in the multilingual context of London. I will describe some of its linguistic characteristics and I'm going to put forward a working hypothesis about its social status, the social status it has in this context. And in particular the hypothesis I'm going to put together is that the intergenerational transmission and maintenance of Cypriot Greek that is the fact that it will be passed on to new generations of speakers is threatened not only by English as the majority language as is most commonly assumed but also by negative attitudes towards Cypriot Greek from within the community itself. In particular I believe and I argue that Cypriot Greek in London is threatened by ideas that it is an inferior form of Greek that have been transplanted from Cyprus and which were further reinforced here in London. Also by the community's complementary school and the way that they engender attitudes towards Cypriot Greek and Stadion Modern Greek in their teaching and also by negative attitudes of speakers from Cyprus towards the way Cypriot Greek has been preserved in London and is spoken by members of the diaspora here in London. So I want to start with the big picture. So London I'm sure you will have heard that people refer to it as a melting pot of languages and cultures and these are just some headings from newspapers and news outlets referring to London as Europe's new ethnic melting pot or melting pot London. London is a melting pot and we should keep it this way. Now this has become somewhat of a cliché although I don't like it very much and I take issue with this metaphor because if you try and deconstruct it what you're really saying is that London is a pot and you put stuff in it and you bring it to high temperature and all the individual ingredients melt and they lose their individual characteristics and they fuse into a new kind of product that comes out of the melting pot. So basically what this metaphor implies is that many different languages and cultures that are present in London are no longer preserved as individual elements of its multilingual, multicultural backdrop. So instead of this I prefer to refer to London as a linguistic mosaic not only because it's a Greek word but also because I think it reflects better the reality of it. So what is a mosaic is basically a picture of a pattern that's made up of smaller individual elements like tiles, stones, gems. So these individual elements are put together to form a nice picture like the one you see here from a Roman building quarry. The nice thing about this is that if you go close, if you start examining it you will be able to discern the individual tiles and the place they occupy it puts together this nice picture. So this is one of the alternatives that I argue for in terms of describing London's linguistic reality. And what is this reality? The reality is that between 200 and 300 languages are spoken by London's pupils and we refer here to London's pupils because this is the most safe metric that we have of establishing the citizen linguistic diversity. Now you see a range there between 200 and 300 languages and this is basically due to differences in what we consider to be a language and what we consider to be a variety of a language for being counted purposes. Whichever the figure, the reality is that London is a very diverse linguistic mosaic and 40 of those languages are spoken by more than 1000 pupils in London. And of course each pupil comes with a family and a family background so you can think of 40 languages that have been quite widespread in London. Now here you see the top 15 languages of London for the years 1999 and 2008. In 1999 Greek was on the table on the top 15 11th position. In 2008 Greek is no longer in the top 15 languages spoken other than English in London. Because we have some new entries, most notably Polish and other European languages that were transplanted anew to London after the 2004 expansion of the European Union. So there is extraordinary linguistic variety in London and this should come as news to no one. Because we live here, we know the reality, we know that many different languages are spoken on the street at homes and schools and workplaces. So London's linguistic diversity comes from the fact that a lot of different ethnolinguistic communities are present in the city and these can be established, they can have a history of many decades of presence in London or they might be more recently arrived communities. Or in certain cases you have an established group and a recently arrived group from the same country of origin. So depending on the history of the community you can have 1st generation, 2nd generation, 3rd generation or 1th generation of speakers of languages other than English. We have a large number of different homelands, different home countries with differences in the historical connections they have to the UK. Now for example looking at the particular example of Cyprus we know that Cyprus has had quite strong ties with the UK historically in recent centuries. Other countries like my home country Greece don't necessarily have this closer connection with the UK historically. Communities differ in terms of the nature of migration, what are the reasons for them migrating to the UK? Are there more cosmopolitan communities that came because they were able to because it was their choice or were there communities because they had to move in search of a better life and of course their timing of migration. And of course there are differences in the degrees of heritage language maintenance and shift to English so some communities are known to preserve their home languages by better mean to more generations than other communities who shift to English sooner. So today I want to talk to you about two different aspects of looking at these languages. The first one is heritage, the notion of heritage language and heritage speaker. So who are heritage speakers? So let's have the hypothetical scenario of two speakers, Kostas and Maria, they origin from Greece. They speak Greek which they started acquiring from birth, age acquisition is zero. So in terms of the order of acquisition, Greek is their L1, their first language. And then at the age of 12 they go to say a language school and they start learning English. So English in terms of the order of acquisition will be their L2, their second language. Then Kostas and Maria fall in love and they decide to move somewhere else. Let's say Chicago, United States of America. And there they have three children, Athena, Tula and Nick. So Athena, Tula and Nick grew up in a Greek speaking household so they start acquiring Greek from the age of zero, from birth. So Greek is their first language. But at the age of five they go to mainstream school where they are exposed to English, the majority language of their society. So English becomes their L2 in terms of the order of acquisition because it's the second language that they start acquiring. But because they develop English as their dominant language because they use it for most of the time at school, they only speak Greek at home, English then becomes their dominant language and this is what the shaded cell means. And then Athena, Tula and Nick have children and they grow up speaking both Greek and English at home. So they hear Greek being spoken by their parents and their grandparents but their parents are American born in this case so they also speak a lot of English at home. So these children grow up with two first languages in the best case scenario. So the second and third generation are what we refer to as heritage speakers of Greek in this case. So they acquire Greek, the heritage language from birth but later on they become dominant in another language, in this case English. So this kind of acquisition or trajectory has been shown to share characteristics with both first language acquisition and adult second language acquisition in terms of both the previous linguistic knowledge that speakers have when they acquire the heritage language and in terms of their input which is a crucial bit. So looking specifically at input, we know that because heritage speakers are born in the context of speaking their heritage language at home from birth that they have an early exposure to it. The exposure is naturalistic and almost exclusively oral which means they only get to hear their heritage language but they don't have abundant and frequent amount of input because at the age of five they move to the school setting where English dominates the majority of tasks they're called to do in that language. So they have varying amounts of input and it's also less varied and contextually restricted because they only speak the home language at home and the majority language in other contexts. So the competence and performance of heritage speakers differ from that of both monolinguals and second language speakers in all grammatical domains and both are extremely variable not only across different speakers but also along the lines of the same individual. So which means that we'll have two speakers who have heritage speakers of the same language they come from a very similar setting the same amount of exposure, the same years of exposure to Greek and English for example and the way they speak Greek will be very very different so one will be a more fluent speaker and the other will not be a very fluent speaker or even within the same individual we might find cases whereby the younger someone is the better their competence is in the heritage language but later on in life this might deteriorate or the opposite. In terms of linguistic features it has been found that certain aspects of grammatical structure and also pronunciation are particularly vulnerable to heritage speakers. So in terms of phonetics certain values of sounds have been found to be particularly vulnerable to differences in the heritage language in terms of morphosyntax features like inflection, agreement or case in nouns and tense aspect mood and agreement in verbs have been found to be particularly vulnerable to changes in heritage language speakers and of course in syntax, noun pronouns and word order are three phenomena that have been identified as particularly interesting in looking at heritage speakers. Can I ask you, is the previous generalisation based only on heritage speakers connected to English or any kind of heritage speakers? Now these come from, in most studies out there the majority language will be English and the heritage language will be something else usually Spanish, Russian because the majority of the studies at least in earlier times came from the United States and these are the two major heritage language speaker groups but now studies are becoming more we have more work being done on other heritage languages and this is one of the cause of people working in heritage linguistics and we need more evidence from other languages but the first studies focused on these features and also they also identified four main reasons why heritage speakers have different competence and performance in these domains the first one is attrition the notion that children acquire the features of the heritage language but later on in life they stop using them or they stop using them as frequently as non-heritage speakers so these features become attrited they become weakened a second reason is interrupted acquisition the idea that acquisition starts at birth for heritage speakers but is interrupted at the age of five when they move on to the school setting so features and aspects of the heritage language that are normally acquired or perfected after the age of five or six or seven will not be the same as in monolingual speakers of course we have transfer from the majority language because don't forget that these speakers become dominant in the society the majority language so this will affect the way they speak their heritage language and of course differences in the input so for example if the input of the type of heritage language that's spoken in the diasporic setting differs from the type that's spoken in the home country this will have an effect on the type of language that heritage speakers speak so far there have been two major quantitative approaches to heritage linguistics from this type of background the experimental one that draws on the methodology and theory of language acquisition and uses predominantly psycholinguistic methods and more recently there was a comparative variationist approach that has been developed looking at a social linguistic methodology in Labovian methods to heritage languages and the results are very divergent so for example looking at ProDrop the ProDrop parameter experimental studies do show that heritage speakers do not perform identical in monolingual so they have different competencies and performances in their heritage languages compared to monolingual speakers but most variationist studies on heritage speakers of Spanish living in the United States do not show any contact effects so this is a gap that needs to be bridged somehow Nag 2015 argues that there are differences in the methodology of the two approaches that may be responsible for the differences in the outcomes and the general recommendation is that the same speakers must be investigated using both methods in any future research so this is the heritage linguistic aspect of looking at languages like Cypriot Greek in London now we're moving on to the more social linguistic aspect of looking at it so remember the three generations of heritage speakers we have the first generation of the parents who are dominant in the native language in this case for example we're going to talk about this would be Greek Cypriot Greek and the third generation is non-native in the majority language in our case English which means of the third generation the ones who transplant who bring the home language to the UK for example we speak English with some sort of accent or fossilized grammatical ungrammatical ways of talking and then in the second generation we have what is very important in terms of the vitality of heritage languages which is a shift in dominance so while the first generation is dominant in the native language the second generation is dominant in the majority language the children of the third generation for example will be dominant in English they will speak English most of the time and they will have low to high proficiency in the heritage language they will be at it or they might be quite bad at it and then when we move to the third generation of course dominance remains the same the third generation the grandchildren of the first generation will be dominant in the majority language and in terms of the heritage language the proficiency will range from intermediate to low or they might not speak the heritage language at all so this clearly paints a scenario of language shift which is that by the third generation the heritage language is on its way out in communities that have heritage languages spoken at home now quite early in 1977 Giles and others tried to capture the social factors that can sort of predict whether a language will be passed on to the next generation or not they termed this the ethno-linguistic vitality of a language and they identified three key areas let's say status demography and institutional support so the idea is for example that if a language has economic status if it's considered to be useful to get a job or to make a career in this world then this language has a higher index of ethno-linguistic vitality than a language that is not considered to be useful in inverted commas so you see there are different types of factors so economic status, social status it's used in education, government services, the mass media and I want today to focus on language status both within and without the community itself this refers to whether a language or a linguistic variety will be considered to be prestigious or non-prestigious both by other speakers and speakers themselves and this is because according to Worm one of the most important factors for the maintenance and reinvigoration of heritage of a threatened language is the attitude of the speakers towards their own language and the importance which they attached to it as a major symbol of their identity the idea being that if speakers consider the language their own language to be an important part of their identity and to be important generally in life they are more likely to speak it to their children to pass it on to the next generation so what are language attitudes? so we know that in most speech communities if not all of them a given variety will be considered proper, correct and good this will be the variety that we call the standard and all other varieties will be deemed improper incorrect, bad or sub or non-standard so in the English context for example especially in Britain it used to be RP, received pronunciation that was considered to be the standard now we refer to southern standard British English the variety of sign English spoken in the south of England and all of the varieties say for example Birmingham English or Brummie it's considered to be something like a sub-standard or bad variety of English now these ideas about linguistic and proppiness we know that they develop through complex social historical processes they take a long time and different types of social and historical circumstances to take shape however once they are established they are transmitted to new generations of speakers through education, governmental policy and other institutional systems that add value to these ideas however as linguists we know that ideas about linguistic proppiness and improperness are not based on any objective facts about language itself whether they are based on subjective preconceived opinions about what language ought to be like and we know that essentially all these attitudes represent attitudes towards particular groups of speakers so when for example we say that I don't know, Geordi sounds bad essentially what we're expressing is a negative attitude towards the people who speak Geordi and not the linguistic variety itself so what does that mean? that means that language attitudes essentially reflect relations of power and status so the people who speak RP are the ones who are more socially powerful and also in economical terms the people who don't speak RP who speak other non-standard varieties of English are the ones who lack somewhat in power and status in this speech community and everywhere where you have differences of power you have important social, cultural, political educational and economic ramifications and the final theoretical point I want to make before I delve into the Greek Cypriot case is the fact that we know, I mentioned before that there are up to 200 or 300 languages being spoken in London and I showed you a nice table with the top 15 languages and this is the current approach to linguistic diversity however diversity and variation within multilingual settings is largely disregarded so for example today I'm going to talk to you about two different varieties of Greek standard Greek and Cypriot Greek but this important distinction between the two is not taken into account in any discussions about the linguistic diversity of cities so community languages are discussed using broad labels such as Bengali, Udu Somali, Arabic and especially if you think about the diversity within Arabic it's crazy to say that Arabic is one language and give it one label as one language is spoken in London so the multiplicative social and linguistic issues that arise from the use of different varieties of these languages in a wide array of contexts of private and public community life is overlooked so my work is situated in this idea that we need to take into account the diversity within multilingualism and multilingual diversity such as in London so moving on to the case study for today I'm going to mainly be talking about two modern Greek varieties on the one hand we have standard modern Greek which is the official language of the Hellenic Republic which is Greece and one of the two official languages of the Republic of Cyprus the other one being Turkish and on the other hand we have Cypriot Greek which refers to the modern Greek varieties that are spoken in Cyprus not variety because we know that even within Cyprus there are differences in the way Cypriot Greek is spoken on the island and people on from Cyprus are able to say where someone is from by the way from the way they speak Cypriot Greek so Cypriot Greek is in no way a uniform dialect there is no such thing as a uniform dialect but for the purpose of the day I'm going to be using Cypriot Greek to refer collectively to all these different forms of Greek that we find in Cyprus so this is a map where it shows you Greece on the left and Cyprus on the bottom right hand corner and this is an important map it's in Greek because I want to make a point I don't want to confuse you with the Greek the map says at the top it's published by the Parliament of Greeks which is the Parliament of Greece it's a historical map of Greece and you see all the different lands in the Balkans and Asia Minor that are or have been part of the Greek state at some point in its history and you see the different dates at which they were added or lost from Greek territory or Greek sovereign territory and you see for example that Turkey is for the most part painted white Bulgaria is white or Benia is white but Cyprus is colourful so why would you include Cyprus in a map of Greece this tells you something about the relations between the two countries the two countries consider themselves to be part of the same larger nation especially of course the Greek Cypriot population of Cyprus considers that they are somehow related ethnically, nationally, historically religiously to Greece of course there is a Turkish Cypriot population on Cyprus that's seen no connection with Greece whatsoever but for the Greek speaking majority of Cyprus there is to certain extent an association with Greece I don't know how many of you have been in Cyprus if you have been in Cyprus you might have been surprised if the Greek flag being flown on Cyprus which if you take a step back and think about why would you fly the flag of another country but why? it's in the constitution, it's constitutional so on the Cyprus constitution it says that individuals in Cyprus are free to fly the Greek and Turkish flags which shows you that the national and political situation between the two countries is complicated to say the least so Cyprus and Greece the dialect has traditionally been divided into 18 different regional varieties there you see the island of Cyprus and you see different numbers so the larger area with number one is the Mesauria plain which is where the capital Nicosia is found you see for example Carpathia at the pointy bed with number four and historically Greek dialectologists had identified different varieties of Cypriot Greek being spoken in these areas now you see all the references from the 1970s after the 1974 war between Cyprus Greece and Turkey we know there was a lot of population movements on the island people were displaced from the original places of residence and there was a move of urbanization and a move towards larger cities and unsurprisingly this movement of populations even within such a small island there was a leveling of intro dialectal differences so this led to the emergence of a pan-Cypriot coin there that is still being formed a more uniform form of Cypriot Greek that is spoken in Cyprus at the moment that said that doesn't mean that regional differences are no longer there they're just not as pronounced as they used to be 30, 40 or 50 years ago now the two Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek are very different linguistically here you see some linguistic features that differentiate the two varieties so for example Cypriot Greek has double consonants and these are distinctive in Standard Modern Greek there's no distinction between single double consonants before the front vowels in Cypriot Greek they turn to here in Standard Greek you have differences in stress patterns so for example in Cypriot Greek you can have a word stressed in the fourth syllable to the end in Standard Greek you can only have the stress up to the third syllable from the end of the word you have differences in the form of nouns and verbs so there you see a specific verb or form the equivalent in Standard Greek the only thing that's the same is the root everything else is different you have differences in the syntax of object clitics and of course differences in the vocabulary including false fans like Cyndetiras which in Cypriot Greek means a stapler whereas in Standard Greek it's a paper clip so forget about the details this shows you that the moment someone opens their mouth everyone knows if they're from Greece or if they're from Cyprus and depending on the degree to which they use features of the dialect the two varieties can be thought to be mutually unintelligible that said of course speakers of Cypriot Greek are quite exposed to Standard Greek so it's easy for, it's not difficult for them to understand Standard Greek but speakers of Standard Greek who have had no exposure to Cypriot Greek can sometimes have difficulty understanding so in terms of the relation the two varieties in Cyprus early accounts viewed the two varieties being in a diagnostic situation in the traditional sense of Ferguson so Standard Modern Greek is the high code and Cypriot Greek is the low code so Standard Modern Greek is a language that you find in a speech in Parliament, in a university lecture or in news broadcast and Cypriot Greek is the language that you use to talk with your family, friends and colleagues and maybe you can find it in folk literature but Cypriot Greek has the advantage that it is the language that is naturally acquired by its speakers so it's the language that is transmitted to new generations Standard Modern Greek is a language that is taught at schools so unless a speaker goes to school they have very minimal exposure and competence in Standard Greek so this is the traditional account that sort of sees the relationship between the two dialects as somewhat complementary use one there and the other one there although more recent proposals by a series of scholars have described the relation between the two in terms of a register or stylistic continuum that means that you have a range of different registers on the one end you have basilectal registers, this means registers that have a high proportion of regional features and this register in Cyprus is labeled vareta, telia or polachorkatica which means heavy total peasantry basically so village tuk and on the other end of it you have the acrolectoregister which is one that incorporates a high number of features from Standard Greek, it's called calamaristika means penpusher tuk and this comes from the idea that this is the language that's only allowed to be written and in between you have those mesolectal registers, something like sostasis that is men, sort of tidied up Cypriot Greek, you do away with all the very heavy features and of course more closer to calamaristika you have avianica kipriaka or polite Cypriot Greek now there was a bit of discussion about this, so Arvanity for example said that the two models the Deglossian model and the register model are not mutually mutually exclusive because Ferguson's model, the Deglossian one accounts for the perceptions and expectations the speakers have as to which varieties are appropriate in which context and it is a reality that speakers of Cypriot Greek know what they are supposed to speak with who and when and also the fact that there is a verb Cypriot Greek or calamarizo which means to speak like a pen pusher which shows you that this type of register is a reality for them so Cariolem was sort of tried to marry the two approaches in talking about a perceptual Deglossia, so the speakers perceive two opposing styles of talking but in reality what they do is they move on this on this continuum all the time so depending on who they are talking to in which context about what they might move towards the more basal electoral register and when they move to another context where they know they should sound more proper they move on to the acro electoral register but this allows for different combinations of features from the dialect and the standard whatever the situation we know that in we have evidence from the 1990s that the two the two different varieties of Cypriot Greek and standard Greek are viewed very differently by speakers of Cypriot Greek so in Papapavlu's match guys test Cypriot Greek speakers rated people who spoke standard Greek as more attractive, more modern, more ambitious, more dependable, more intelligent more pleasant, more interesting and more educated which shows you that standard Greek has what we call overt prestige it's the variety that makes you sound all these things however speakers of Cypriot Greek sound more sincere, more kind more friendly and more humorous which shows you that Cypriot Greek has what we call covert prestige it's the language of solidarity among speakers of Cypriot Greek but the one that will bring you forward in life is standard Greek later on Papapavlu and Sophocleus in further studies identified certain aspects of the dialect as being perceived as especially rural, peasant like and unappealing and what they identify was the two sounds and these are sounds that do not exist in standard Greek and they're very easily spotted when someone is talking so if they say or if a word has then you know that this is a Cypriot word and not a standard Greek word and in 2009 Papapavlu and Sophocleus found that speakers associates the basillateral register the heavy peasantry with a very rural way of life and a low level of education and on the other hand standard Greek is associated with politeness so they concluded that this indicates certain feelings of inferiority when you have speakers telling you that Cypriot Greek is not a correct language and where does all this come from it comes from education but Papavlu and Papavlu talked about the covert language policy in Cyprus that only accepts standard Greek as the language of instruction at all levels and sometimes this will be expressed through circulars such as this from 2002 that says that educators should use standard modern Greek during class time and they should expect the same from their students the Greek Cypriot dialect is respected and can be used by students in certain cases for communication such as in role plays representing scenes from everyday life when reciting poems etc the above mentioned should be performed within logical boundaries and not at the expense of the development of standard modern Greek which constitutes our national language so you see that the idea that you should the desired effect is for pupils to acquire standard Greek the national language that ties Cyprus with Greece so driven by these guidelines I'm just going to skip this driven by these guidelines teachers in Cyprus have been found through number of research publications that they actively discourage the use of Cypriot Greek in the classroom on behalf of the students through explicit corrections they code switch to Cypriot Greek only in informal instances of communication in encouragement and commenting but then they switch again to standard Greek when they want to assert their authority but the minute they leave the classroom they mean they walk out of the door they use Cypriot Greek with colloquial students outside the classroom so think of this paranoid situation the same person speaks to you in two different varieties they expect this they expect you to speak only one of them and you have to work out which one is which and which one to use with the same person in different situations and God forbid you cannot use Cypriot Greek when you write or when you talk about your your class material so this is an example from an in-class observation in the Greek Cyprus school done by Eleanor Neatham published in 2009 so Eretto is a teacher and she's asking what will we do now this isn't a language class this is an art class so basically the the pupil is asking are we going to paint are we going to sing are we going to create something with cart and paper or whatever and the teacher says what will we do not what will we do but what will we do what will we do where she basically picks up on the use of Enna which is a Cypriot future marker and she corrects the student repeating the correct the standard Greek marker now what's interesting about this instance is that Eretto's original question doesn't include only one Cypriot Greek feature but two of them so the verb form Karmume for we do is also Cypriot Greek the equivalent in standard Greek would be Karnume with an N instead of an M but the teacher doesn't pick up on it because it's not high on her hierarchy of Cypriotness or linguistic Cypriotness so which shows you that what the teacher is asking the student to produce is a mixed utterance one that includes features of standard Greek but also some features of Cypriot Greek which sort of go below the radar so moving on to the UK context now so what do we find here so the UK has been traditionally the top destination for Cypriot migrants Kosnodino identifies five different periods or phases in the migration of Cypriots from Cyprus to the UK now if you don't know much about Cyprus you might be tempted to think that the majority of the migrants arrived after 1974 and the war but that is not true the majority of the migrants arrived between 1960 and 1963 Cyprus became independent in 1960 and reportedly there was a feeling of insecurity as to whether Cyprus could make it on its own as an independent country it hadn't been one in its history it's a very small island so a lot of people thought it would be better if they migrated to the United Kingdom also the Commonwealth immigrants art that was passed in 1962 played a big role before 1962 citizens of the Commonwealth could move to the UK and work and live here without the need of residents or work permits which is basically what happened to the Windrush generation in 1962 the British government decided that there should be a limit to the number of migrants that were able to come in from Commonwealth countries and that there will be tighter controls in the number of them that will be coming in so citizens from all the different Commonwealth countries knew that the art was going to pass so they made their way to the UK before the art was passed which is basically what's going to happen with Brexit and the deadline of the 29th of March 2019 so today there is a large proportion of Cypriots living in the UK and especially in London if we try and find information the Office for National Statistics is one source but it only gives you the number of Cypriot born UK residents which is basically the first generation it doesn't record any information about the children of the first generation so according to the National Federation of Cypriots in the UK there are between 100,000 UK residents with a Cypriot background now this might seem small compared to the overall population of London or to that of other communities but if you think that the population of Cyprus as a whole is a little under one million people you do realise that London might be the most the city with the largest Cypriot population and not Nicosia, Orlanica or Limassol the majority of these migrants live in London and especially in these five northernmost boroughs Enfield, Barnett, Haringey Islington and Camden and there you see the percentage of school pupils who declare Greek as their home language so for example in Enfield that's 2.6 and if you think there's a choice of 300 languages you do realise this is quite a high percentage the community is very visible especially in those areas around Palmer's Green South Gates Wood Green it's a very active community they have shops, churches community centres, schools newspapers, radio stations TV channels so looking first at the linguistic features of the community what do we find three main features we find basalecto features that originate in the local Cypriot varieties that were brought over by the first generation so within quotes like peasanty features that the first generation brought over from Cyprus then we have acrolecto features that is standard features that gain prestige through the community education system the church and the media and of course we have contact effects from English and we have tried to sort of capture the degree to which we find these features so with the first generation we find a more intense a higher number of basalecto features was with the second and third generations we find unsurprisingly more contact effects and more acrolecto features from standard Greek so looking at basalecto features what do we find so we find everything really especially lexical items so words like mavloka for pilo or poate for here these are words that in Cyprus are no longer used or at least if they are used they are considered to be quite rural and old-fashioned whereas they are still used normally in London we also find phonological variants so for example the alternation between fur and chur in lachos for mistake instead of lathos or that between fur and fur in affimume for I remember instead of affimume which are both still used in Cyprus but they are on their way out and also morphological variants such as a yoni for the first person pronounced instead of a ro at the same time we find features that are from standard Greek like then for the negate instead of n instead of catalavo for understand and also certain from logical variants that you wouldn't expect to find and people who speak Cypriot Greek between them so if one person from Cyprus speaks to another person from Cyprus they are not likely to say callochery for some of them they should be saying callochery and chair instead of care for and now moving on to contact effects especially in the first generation we find a lot of words that were borrowed from English Cypriot Greek and which were crucially phonologically and morphologically integrated into the system of Cypriot Greek so landlord became lallos or lallos bus became topason and cooker became a cooker now I see you laughing because these words have acquired a certain kind of style implication so they speakers consider them to be funny I'm going to ask you later why you think they are funny but in terms of linguistics they are actually the best thing you can do to a foreign word you take a foreign word and you adapt it to your native system and you turn it into Greek you can use it in the singular, the plural, the nominative, the genitive, the accusative and it doesn't exist in your language as a foreign word because in Greek foreign words we had to remain uninflected and for different reasons these words have acquired this sort of connotations of the third generation, a bit of uneducated kind of background in the second generation this doesn't exist anymore in the second generation we have extensive lexical insertions and code switching so you might find people saying we do the extra effort and effort will be pronounced in the British English way or they might have whole phrases like with a head on her shoulders I wanted to find a woman with the head on her shoulders sometimes we find differences in agreement so there are certain words now in Greek we have a gender agreement system so so the word for correct at the end should be feminine as well it should be but because there's a second generation speaker we see that they have a neuter agreement, a neuter form sometimes we have a number agreement mismatches like so Greek is like Spanish and Italian where instead of saying you like I like something you say it pleases so here you should have form should be in the plural because the syntactic subject is in the plural instead you have in the singular you also have number agreement in personal verbs now in Greek a lot of modal verbs only occur in the third person singular form so this should be instead of this is a clear transfer from English differences in case marking so this is in the accusative whereas it's a subject that should be in the nominative form and sometimes you have a lack of negative concord now in Greek as a language with negative concord you have to have double negatives whereas the speaker here says it was always the word for pillow there you have a missing negator you should have now what's interesting though it's that none of these deviant structures occur systematically in the speech of any of the second generation speakers that we interviewed as part of our which means that these speakers will make those errors in passing but none of these will be systematic so for the most part the Greek will be correct now I had prepared some more but I don't have much time so moving on to the social linguistic status of Cypria Greek here in London we find three main languages in the repertoire we find Cypria Greek that is used among family members friends both in and outside the house we find English which is used in all interactions with speakers from outside the community and also among British born Greek Cypriots and of course standard Greek that is used in all formal aspects of the community administration and activities so in schools in church and the media so this is the distribution of Cypria Greek and standard Greek is the same as in Cyprus but here we crucially have the addition of English as the majority language so how are the two Greek varieties used in the Parikia in the expatriate community so you see here the front page of Greek Cypriot newspaper from some time ago and you see there on the on the left the title of an article Agenistrasis and Khorkatos Khorkatos is a very distinctly Cypriot word it means something like a Yoko or a country bumpkin someone who is uncouth and lacks in manners it is not standard Greek but it is used in the newspaper when it is used in the newspaper it is put in those Greek quotation marks they look like the French quotation marks why would they need to do this because Cypriot Greek does not have a place on the front page of the newspaper it is not supposed to be written it is not supposed to be in the title of a serious article but because we are talking about Recep Tayyip Erdogan someone that we do not like very much and we want to attribute this label to him we will make this concession we will use the dialect to describe him because this is the only word that truly describes him but still we need to put it in quotation marks otherwise it would look like the dialect has a legitimate place on the front of this newspaper this is these are two screenshots from from a Greek TV show on Hellenic TV so this show is called expatriate community this is London so you have the presenter of it on one hand and then you have another character who is half crazy aunt who lives in north London so if I ask you to guess which one of the two speaks standard Greek and which one of the two speaks Cypriot Greek I am sure you all get it right so what kind of image does this paint about the speakers of Cypriot Greek and what kind of image does it paint about who speaks standard Greek so we know that in 2001 Pavlou did a study on the degree of use of the two languages Cypriot Greek and English in the community so here you see the percentages of use of Cypriot Greek and English among 12 to 18 year olds plotted against different members of the family so you have grandparents uncles, aunts, father, mother cousins, siblings and friends so you see that the use of the dialect the home language is high only with grandparents and 75.5% when you move to younger members of the family as you come closer to your siblings and friends the use of the dialect drops dramatically to 1.4% and the use of English is up to 87.6% so if you start thinking about it why would it be so high with grandparents it's clearly because they might not have such a good command of English in the first place so speaking Greek with them is a matter of necessity and with the people that you have a choice to speak English like your parents who out here and for work so they know English or with your cousins and siblings who are probably born here like you you speak English and you don't use the dialect so English was seen as posing the most significant threat to the vitality of the dialect in London very early on so the use of English at home was seen as a major threat in the protective fortress of the home, the Cypriot-Greek speaking environment early researchers also talked about those non-reciprocal interactions which is a situation where the parent will speak to the child in Greek and the child will reply in English and of course the change in dominance in the transition from the first to the second generation and already in Aksagoro in 1990 concluded that the process of abandonment under way among the second generation leaves no space for optimism about the maintenance of the Cypriot dialect in the third or fourth generations now in terms of attitudes a lot of researchers agree that the dialect is viewed positively in London by its speakers speakers consider it to be a symbol of their ethnic identity their immigrant history and a point of reference with a distinct culture and according to these researchers English and Greek are not thought to be competing by these speakers but are thought of as fulfilling different communicational needs and Pavel and Pavel even go as far as to say that there are no signs of negative attitudes towards Cypriot-Greek which UK Cypriots seem to master at high levels in modern standard Greek and I'm going to show you that this is not true already in 1990 Aloneftis did a study of the experiences of British born Greek Cyprus went to Cyprus on the summer holiday and she found that Cyprus-born Cypriots derived the way UK-born Cypriots speak when they visit Cyprus when they speak English they are accused of pretentiousness and snobbery so when they try and speak Greek instead they are marked and considered uncouth due to the high number of basillectal features that they use basically they are either thought to be pretending to be British or to be talking like the grandparents from 60 years ago and no one speaks like that anymore in Cyprus there is even an expression that applies predominantly to British-born Cypriots and the way they speak Greek and this expression is which basically means your tongue clicks so when they encounter a speaker who speaks Cypriot-Greek with a little bit of an accent with them your tongue clicks and this is not viewed positively by British-born speakers so this is Stevie George he is an online celebrity or celebrity to become and he posted this some months ago Happy New Year guys now there is one sentence that I get every single bloody day in Cyprus where he lives Yes Sherlock Holmes I know that I speak with a bit of an accent there is no need to state the obvious now rude if I am totally honest as I never tell anybody that they speak English a little dodgy if they are from another country it is a bit of a pain in the backside instead of appreciating that the opposite person speaks two languages some individuals have to pick and poke the faults my blood pressure so what did we find in our investigations of attitudes in the community we found that of course Cyprus is a part of the identity of British-born Cypriots like Marius for example he likes to speak my language I do not want to lose a Greek language I do not want to lose the fact that I am Cypriot because I think that if I lose a language I will not be Cypriot anymore I will not feel that I am 100% Cypriot so there is a clear association between the language and being Cypriot however we do find that intergenerational transmission does break between the first and second generation so Stella says that at our home when we speak a Greek to our children this is wrong, I know it is wrong but they are very young and I want them to know English well to know many words but there are negative attitudes towards the variety because speakers do refer to it as Horkard Kavillagy and Varetin Heavy so Kiriakos says that for me Cypriot Greek is like it is from the village and the male and Greeks are you know from the city so the divide between rural and urban is well but they also describe Cypriot Greek as spasmena which means broken so for example Adamos says that Greek here in London is broken which is clearly a transfer of the English label for non-standard forms of English but when you ask he later on goes to say that the very broken type has che che is a Cypriot Greek word for end it has a che sound and it is found in standard Greek but this is normal for monolingual Cypriot Greek speakers it is not an error, it is not a mistake it is not an ungrammatical structure in English broken is usually applied to structures from say Jamaican English or African American English that are thought to be ungrammatical in standard English terms but this is not an ungrammatical structure it is just a different variant from a logical variant of Cypriot Greek among some speakers the use of material is improper and correct so this speaker Anna a very well educated speaker says what I don't say che you che you means me too but both the word che and you I are in the Cypriot dialect of form so why do you not say because it is not correct yes but it is not an error, it is not a mistake no no I am a believer in speaking correctly and why do people say it is laziness so again the use of British explanation for the use of non-standard features that the people who don't speak with a standard accent are just lazy so instead the use of standard Greek is considered to be proper and polite so according to Elia if I am talking with someone from Greece I feel that I too have to make the effort let's say to be polite and say che instead of che so it all boils down to how you say end if you want to sound polite you have to say che if you want to sound like if you are from the village you say che or you avoid that altogether so unsurprisingly we found that these negative perceptions are rooted in the community's educational system so this is the experience of a speaker from when she gave us this testimony she was I think 36 years of age and this happened to her when she was 6 she said I remember when I was in the first grade of Greek school one day I was late and there was no chair for me to sit and I said to the teacher I don't have a tsaira tsaira is a simple word for chair and the teacher gave me that look she said what is that chair I said chair in English and she said it's not tsaira it's karekla karekla is the standard Greek word for chair so imagine this the child asks for a chair to sit on and is treated with contempt now the teacher wanted the child to use the standard Greek word karekla but this child was born in the UK it's the first grade so she's 6 so it's the first time she's a Greek school how was she supposed to know the Greek word if she grew up in a Cypriot-Greek speaking household and faced with this the child what did she do she spoke English chair I said in English so basically the purpose of education in this case which was for her to learn the Greek word failed and what's more telling is the sort of self reflection that she went on to make and then I realized that the Cypriot that I knew the Cypriot that I had learned was heavy Cypriot so then I realized I didn't speak correctly I spoke in a mistaken way and this is a 6 year old making these reflections about the way she speaks her home language negative perceptions are also present in less formal settings within the community so here we have another speaker who says that when we were young when someone would come to visit we would talk to our parents with a peasanty sort of accent so my mother would say this word is not correct if we try to use it if you use it it is not correct you have to use that other word because this one is peasanty so people who come to visit cannot think that we are peasants because we use those words and the third thing that we are now exploring are the tensions between London's Diaspora and the Cyprus metropolis now in Cyprus British born UK Cypriots have their own label they are called Charlie's Charlie's and Charlie's they are perceived by some as uneducated, unsophisticated and lacking in manners which goes back to the nature of the first migration because if the early migrants from Cyprus came from low socio-economic backgrounds in the UK this stereotypical Cyprus born Greek Cypriot especially one from the modern day has all the characteristics of the provincial nouveau-rich they are considered to be conceited, arrogant and ostentatious so for example, Savas told us when he was talking how he went on holiday to Rhodes the Greek island, they asked him what the people are like he said that people are simpler in Rhodes like the Cypriots used to be the Cypriots are very conceited nowadays, found as many as a Greek where there means someone who thinks too highly of themselves and also this expression is very prominent if we go to Cyprus they know we are English because as they say to me my tongue clicks so there is a growing cleavage between the British community and the community in Cyprus in terms of how English in terms of how Greek is spoken and this is put very vividly by Yorgos who says that their language the people in Cyprus has changed so much that I do not understand them anymore I do not understand them first, they do not use any more the words that I know second, their accent has moved to the direction of Greek so their language changed a lot to me they seem like liars why speak standard Greek if you are Cypriot we have our own language why do you not speak it so what we are trying to say what I am trying to argue is that these attitudes lead to a preference for the use of standard Greek among the community in general because I understand both Cypriot Greek and standard Greek now because I learnt it at school but when I speak I try to speak the Greek way rather than the Cypriot way so seeing as you hang out with Cypriot people mostly why do you try to speak Greek that is what we are taught at school they were priests and the church this is because a lot of the Greek schools operate within churches and there is this very strong religious element there Christala says for example very often I do not want my children to learn the type of Greek that I speak because it is not a perfect model I prefer for them to hear standard Greek so to sum up what we are finding in our research is that Cypriot Greek is an indispensable part of London's linguistic mosaic the Parikia the community has a very rich linguistic repertoire from which its members draw to fulfil their needs and to signal that they belong to the UK's Greek Cypriot community however there is a steady decline in the use of Cypriot Greek by the younger generations I am arguing that Cypriot Greek is threatened not only by English as the majority language but also due to its perceived inferior status with respect to standard Greek and to the way that Cypriot Greek is presently spoken in Cyprus positive perceptions of standard Greek and a mixture of positive and negative perceptions of Cypriot Greek have been transplanted from Cyprus to London attitudes in London are preserved and reinforced by the same social institutions as in the original context of Cyprus with the complementary scores playing a key role in engendering these negative attitudes the attitude driven practice that we find in London schools show high degrees of similarity to the ones in Cyprus however unlike in Cyprus in London the use of Cypriot Greek is discouraged even in informal settings such as the home environment altogether these practice lead to a community wide preference for the use of standard Greek in communication even with members of the Greek Cypriot community which I believe poses another serious threat to the inter-generation transmission and maintenance of the dialect as a heritage language in London in addition to the pressure that is exerted by English that's it, thank you very much for your attention that was really interesting we have about 20 minutes for questions let's start well you said that we laughed at landlord's that's what my parents used to we laughed because my parents used to say landlord's and it was because they they couldn't get their tongue round with things like that I mean it was just impossible for them to say landlord impossible the other thing they always say and I say it, we say it is put the kettle on and to this day I don't know what the kettle is in Greek I've got no idea kettle I mean our parents came in Cyprus many in the thirties when you said my parents are 32 and 33 that's why our dad came over in 1934 because if he hadn't have come to find some work here to send money back to Cyprus to pay taxes to the British government then they would have confiscated some of his land if he didn't want to and when he came here it was worse in London than it was in Cyprus actually and then suddenly my mum came over and never went back but we learned Greek at home Cypriot Greek and when we went to primary school I mean it was just eating my mum wouldn't let us say to her no she wouldn't a lot of things they used to very similar to these I've had it quite sad as well that when we go to Cyprus the Cypriots look down their noses and you're right Charlie in terms of but when you go to old well it's the younger ones it's very interesting thank you very much that was very interesting so you mentioned that there's the British High School and I'm just wondering if there's a policy in the school which is the use of two types of I didn't have enough time there is an authority called the Cyprus Educational Mission it's an office in North London with staff directly from Cyprus to the education of Cyprus the purpose is to oversee the education that's provided in complementary schools they have a curriculum it's not a full blown one there's no one that was commissioned by the Cypriot government it was one that was sort of sort of a grassroots movement that they wrote because they needed some kind of guidance for the teachers I think that Alec has mentioned once in the curriculum as being part of the identity of the students and that's it, there is no real policy about how to take the linguistic repertoire of the students into accounting designing, teaching and learning practice so this is a project that Alexander and I are currently doing with in-class observations into schools to see what actually happens in the classrooms because everything I showed you is from what people told us but no, the answer is no I'm just curious about the language attitudes among the teachers and the classroom language is one thing but you know whether they would be willing to the media instruction as opposed to talking to children during the break or right after the class I'm just wondering if the teacher would try not to use the separate Greek or so I'm just curious about now even in Cyprus and of course here in London they might try not to speak Cypriot but they will never succeed like if you're someone like me who I'm from Greece I will always be able to tell that the teachers are speaking with either a Cypriot accent or you can use the Cypriot one without really knowing it they avoid certain features like this church sound for example but others will always be there and in London we have the additional presence of English so in our observations so far the speakers use standard Cypriot and English in class for instruction because they know that if they don't do that the pupils basically understand very little of what they're saying I'm interested I'm going to thank you very much again very interesting I'm interested in what you're saying about this particular case study and others that I've seen so for example one of my former Ph.D. students looked at the teaching of Kurdish in our education classes in London is it Bego? yes so it's very similarly found that more rustic let's say the more regional varieties were found in the classes and like you said with the example of the the TV program she too showed the example of that as a stereotypical views of how people speak so I think this thing is happening all over I was also interested in the when we talked about the attrition processes research I found very similar research on things that are happening in Genesee in Guernsey with people who let's say are perhaps semi-speakers might be scrambles by linguists similar things happening losing agreements of gender etc. particularly yeah thank you for this as it happens we're hosting a symposium this time at a conference in Crete on non-standard forms of diaspora languages we have a panel of experts from different communities in the first attempt to look at this in differences and Bego is one of the panellists Alexander and I were presenting on standard Greek and she searched a bushel group our other colleague from she's from the Turkish Shipper community to present her data from that community which is very similar to what we find in the Greek Shipper community so this is a transfer from an in-class observation that she did which basically the teacher the children use one form the teacher tells them don't use it use the other one that is from Turkey and they say but I use that one with my dad so it's very similar we know that we have plans to create more work of people who work on these areas because we need this comparative aspect and yeah the attrition is the usual Do you know in this case if there are younger generations of Crete Greek speakers who are who are sort of pushing for maintaining the language or using things like that No I find because I'm quite involved with the community as well I frequently go and talk about it in non-academic contexts they all sympathize, they all say oh you're right or we should do something about it but they don't and by the time this message reaches them they're already dominant in English and even if they want to they will struggle to do anything and another common pattern that I found is that they might be very negative towards it in younger ages and by the time they grow older they sort of rethink oh actually it might have been a good idea if I spoke Greek to my children or it might have been a good idea if I spoke more Greek myself sort of reinventing your heritage basically so yeah it's not very positive it's very difficult for people who are born here to speak Greek not that I'm my sister we never speak Greek together but we can speak Greek so friends of ours who were born here their children were born here their grandchildren so Greek is virtually non-existent it's something that's and I was a lot in language-making and through vitalisation people if people are really going to do this they need to make a life-changing decision to actually use their heritage language it has to be something that you actually take a active position to do what happened to your follower I was just I was wondering how much because you did mention about taking trips to Cyprus how much contact do people have with people in Cyprus how many people are taking trips back and forth or spending summers in Cyprus it's very common and it's become more common obviously in recent decades with checker flights and easier way of getting there it's very common we're last week in for two days this is not it might be difficult to answer it's not directly related to this but I was wondering why Cyprus never became a standard language if there's I'm sure there's as in standard language in terms of being written in the media now Greek has a very old history of Deglossia and when we say old we talk about millennia already in the the Atticism movement is a movement in the Hellenistic time which is around 300 BC to 380 where Greek speakers decided they shouldn't write the way they speak so they should always write in form that is goes back in time like in the classical times always something else than the spoken language so the roots of this idea are very very deep and then later on as the modern Greek dialects started to develop like Cyprus Greek they were originally written as it happens some of the earliest medieval Greek dialectal writing the literature come from Cyprus like the or laws in the Assisi were written in Cypriot Greek but then with the the rise of nationalism in the relationship with Greece the language of Greece always was thought to be the standard the one that we had to use Cyprus follows Greece in terms of the language policy always there was however an attempt to change things so in 2010 a new curriculum was published the National Curriculum for Public Schools of the Republic of Cyprus in 2010 now this curriculum was the first one ever in Cyprus that aimed for students to acquire a full overview of the structure of standard Greek and of the Cypriot Greek variety to view the Cypriot dialect as a variety which displays systematicity and for children to be able students to be able to analyse a range of hybrid texts and to basically apply critical literacy to the multilingual multicultural society of Cyprus and then so this curriculum didn't aim at introducing the teaching of Cypriot Greek to be a Cypriot Greek hour in the curriculum they only aimed at using the Cypriot Greek dialect as a resource for developing the students literacy in the standard so what you say in Cypriot Greek in this way you say in the standard in that way now this was introduced in 2010 I think in 2015 there was a change of government in Cyprus from a left wing to a right wing government a conservative circles viewed this or interpreted this as a move away from Greece so you're giving the status to the Cypriot dialect by doing this which means you're moving away from the motherland of Greece the curriculum was put under review and withdrawn in 2015 so we're back to the old curriculum which basically has no place for the dialect in it there are strong ideological reasons for why it's not standardised if you standardise it you elevate it to a language and it's not a language so yeah it's complicated so apart from this was the number of feeling among Cypriots there people might have if you ask people they'll tell you it's a language they'll tell you we should write it there should be a description of it how do you write it how do you write Cypriot oh you can write it you can put hats on letters people do write it but there is no standardised system different publishers will use different systems but there's no unique language so we have time for another very brief question which I also have to ask I have a question I see you everyday yes I forgot to ask do you think that in the future there will be a standardisation of Cypriots I mean the language will say you can never predict the future so I don't know what was the question that standardisation of Cypriot because there are reasons that's a political question perhaps I mean if ever the good relations between Greece and Cyprus break and if we ever stop giving each other 12 points in the Eurovision Song Contest then maybe the conditions will be right for this kind of movement but I don't see that happening anyway all right I don't know thank you very much