Greek Dialogues - Re-presenting Griko, Greko and Pontian today: Ideologies of Greek compared

Date and Time: Thursday, 31st October, 2024 at 18:30h GMT

Online: Access details below

Venue: Room GR04, Faculty of English, 9 West Rd, Cambridge CB3 9DP

The first Greek Dialogues seminar of this academic year features Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellow Dr. Manuela Pellegrino (University of Southern Denmark) discussing the linguistic and cultural activism surrounding Griko/Greko (Southern Italy) and Pontian (Northern Greece), focusing on how speakers of these Greek varieties negotiate their identities within the frameworks of Greek Hellenism and minority language status.

Drawing from extensive anthropological research, Dr. Pellegrino will explore the social actors involved in language preservation, their interactions with local and national institutions, and the evolving ideologies of language and Hellenism in these regions.

"My current research provides a comparative investigation of linguistic/cultural activism in relation to Griko/Greko (Southern Italy) and Pontian (Northern Greece). Speakers of these varieties of Greek have been negotiating and reconciling understandings of and claims to sameness/otherness with respect to the linguistic and cultural standards of Greek Hellenism (for Pontian, Manos 2004, Zografou 2007, Zografou and Pipyrou, 2016; for Greko Petropoulou 1995 and Pipyrou 2016).

In my work on the politics of language revival of Griko and Greko -- the Italo-Greek varieties used in a few villages in the Southern Italian provinces of Lecce (Apulia) and Reggio Calabria (Calabria) respectively (Pellegrino 2016, 2021, 2024), I recast such representational conundrum by focusing on language itself and crucially on speakers’ ideologies about their languages (Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity, 1998 among others).

Building on year-long anthropological research conducted in Southern Italy and on more recent fieldwork among Pontian-speakers and activists in the area of Thessaloniki and Kavala, in this talk I present the categories of the social actors involved in the preservation and promotion of these varieties and cultural heritage, I analyse the activities in which they engage, and I highlight how they interact with the respective local and national institutional landscapes.

My aim is to investigate the wider representational dynamics in which such varieties are immersed as ‘minority languages’ within the Italian and Greek national space and to assess the historical production of ideologies of language and of Hellenism, their shifting nature and their effects on local discourses and national representations.

This comparison is particularly enlightening considering the different political position of Italian national speakers of Griko and Greko from Pontian speakers. Yet, beyond the historical and extant specificities of the cases under analysis, as “minority language speakers” they are all confronted with expectations to conform to pre-ordered categories of re-presentation within which they negotiate their position."
 

Topic: Greek Dialogues - Re-presenting Griko, Greko and Pontian today: Ideologies of Greek compared
Date and Time: Thursday October 31st, 2024 18:30h GMT

Join Zoom Meeting: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81974120534?pwd=14kU6D6aA0HgP9XAgbmWCmkbTk8wjN.1

(If you cannot access the seminar by clicking on the link, copy the whole link and paste it into your web browser's address bar.)

Meeting ID: 819 7412 0534
Passcode: 718873

: The Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies Channel

: CCGS Cambridge | Facebook