Date and Time: Tuesday, 27th May, 2025 at 17:00h BST
Online: Access details below
Venue: Room G21, Faculty of Classics, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA
For this seminar we welcome Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellow Professor Georgios Kritikos (Harokopio University, Attica) who explores language as a unifying force. In the early 20th century, Asia Minor was home to a vibrant mosaic of Greek-speaking communities, shaped by centuries of coexistence and cultural exchange under Ottoman rule. These communities spoke diverse forms of Greek marked by rich regional variation and rooted in everyday life.
The Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) and the ensuing population exchange shattered this linguistic landscape, displacing entire communities and scattering speakers of demotic Greek across the newly defined borders of Greece and Turkey. The result was the fragmentation of dialectal continuity and the emergence of isolated enclaves where once-flourishing varieties of Greek struggled to survive.
"This seminar will analyse how language can operate as a means of economic, social and cultural power. It will examine how demotic language in interwar Greece worked as a tool of national and social integration for the linguistic minorities of the country.
It should be noted that after the conclusion of the Greek-Turkish war took place the settlement of almost 1,3 million Asia Minor refugees in a country with a population hardly over 5 million and katharevousa as the official language of the state. They were exchanged with the Muslim population of Greece under the exclusive criterion of religion. Their settlement took place in a context of linguistic contestation within the educational and social life of the country, provoked by the respective propagators of the ‘purist’ language (katharevousa) and the vernacular (demotic). However, the education reform of 1929 of Eleftherios Venizelos provided for the teaching of demotic in all years of elementary schools for the first time in Greek history.
This seminar will discuss how language in the education system confirms the authority of one language over another in the labour market and the reproduces social inequalities along with the power of written language over oral cultures and dialects in Greece."
Online Access Details
Topic: Greek Dialogues - Greek language in interwar Greece: a reproduction of social and cultural inequalities
Date and Time: Tuesday 27th May, 2025 17:00h GMT
Join Zoom Meeting: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/82850977382?pwd=uCEyg8tIJQarGOUr5kfFR2FhTqSynx.1
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Meeting ID: 828 5097 7382
Passcode: 362525
Livestreaming on:
: The Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies Channel
