The Globalization of Greek Language: the Case of Sociolinguistic Meta-Language

Irene Theodoropoulou (King's College London) [BIO]

Email: eirini.theodoropoulou@kcl.ac.uk

 

ABSTRACT:

Globalization is a phenomenon, which is more than apparent among the members of (socio)linguistic speech community, whose meta-language, i.e. the jargon they are using to describe and interpret (socio)linguistic phenomena, is an amalgam of terms elicited from various languages, and mainly from Greek and Latin (e.g. bodily hexis, habitus [Bourdieu 1991], authenticity, style, emblematization [Silverstein 2003], heteroglossia [Bakhtin 1981], etc.). After presenting some indicative etymologies of basic sociolinguistic terms, I will be focusing on the reasons why Greek language has been and is still considered to be such an invaluable source for creating sociolinguistic metalanguage. The basic position to be argued in favor of is that the high “value” (Bourdieu 1991) Greek has in the scientific market, i.e. in almost all of the sciences, regardless whether we are referring to the humanities or the social or even the natural sciences, is the basic reason why Greek not only does not run the peril of extinction through globalization, but, on the contrary, it can retain its key position as one of the most dynamic and reliable fonts for providing material for the purposes of a scientific meta-language, such as the sociolinguistic one.

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References

• Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language & Symbolic Power, edited & introduced by John B. Thompson, translated by Gino Raymond & Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Silverstein, Michael (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. In Language & Communication 23, pp. 193-229.