The state of Modern Greek language as spoken in Victoria

This thesis reports a soctolinguistic study, carried out between 1981 and 1984, of the state of the Modern Greek (MG) language in Australia, as spoken by native-speaking first-generation Greek immigrants in Victoria. Particular emphasis is given to the analysis of those characteristics of the linguistic behaviour of these Greek Australians which can be attributed to contact with English and to other environmental, social and linguistic influence.;The second part, Chapter IV, contains analysis of data collected by means of structured interviews with 200 informants in Victoria. Non-standard phenomena in a corpus of approximately 500,000 words showing various types of inter-lingual transference are classified and accounted for.;In the final part of the thesis, Chapters V and VI, the linguistic phenomena observed are examined in terms of their incidence and causes in correlation with social, linguistic and psychological factors in order to determine the extent of assimilation, the content, context and medium of the language-event.;The thesis concludes that, at this stage of language contact, the available evidence suggests that a new communicative norm with some degree of stability of form has been adopted which serves the linguistic needs of the Greek community. This ethnolect (a norm which is known and used by an ethnic group in a dynamic and/or static bilingual situation) is accepted by the community at least for some purposes. However, as only first-generation Greek immigrants were interviewed and their speech alone was analysed, further research needs to be conducted in order to ascertain the overall pattern of contact of MG and Australian English. Furthermore, in order to examine the degree of its stability of form, further longitudinal investigations of the linguistic behaviour of the same informants should follow. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).;The work is divided into three parts. In the first part, Chapters I to III, the perspectives of contact between MG and English are discussed, a critical review made of the existing literature, and a description given of the linguistic environment, social institutions and other factors affecting language maintenance, on the basis of data derived from oral and written responses to a structured questionnaire administered to a stratified sample of 1311 respondents in Victoria. This questionnaire elicited information on respondents' background and social position, and probed the respondents' linguistic habits and attitudes toward language.