Tseligka, Theodora

Some Cultural and Linguistic Phenomena of Internet-Mediated Greeklish

Abstract

The recent growth of interest in novel linguistic practices on the Internet has mostly related to English, rather than to languages from specific national cohorts, such as Greek. In fact, Greece has only recently experienced the spread of electronic communication which is bringing about significant changes in a society known as being distinctly 'Greek'. This presentation investigates the cultural and linguistic implications of an idiosyncratic phenomenon which is known as 'Greeklish, namely the use of the Latin alphabet to transcribe Greek in computer-mediated communication (CMC). The functional motivation behind this practice is traced in technological limitations that originally obscured language interaction in CMC in non Latin-alphabeted languages, including Greek. Despite recent technological advances, the phenomenon lives on, uncovering a multitude of cultural implications, interwoven with the users' language perceptions and practices. An initial electronic survey generated general data on users' perceptions and was followed by the compilation of a small corpus of Greek and Greeklish emails, aiming to identify recurrent linguistic patterns. In addition to frequency measures, a qualitative analysis was instigated based on case studies. These comprised face-to-face interviews, acquiring email samples from the subjects and involving them in a computer-based sentence comprehension experiment, which was created on the basis of the various orthographic patterns observed in Latin-alphabeted Greek emails. Some preliminary findings show that writing/reading in a foreign alphabet affects Greek users in specific language aspects when composing their emails, but also challenges traditional views on particular language and cultural issues. Although the information is of most interest in the national context, there are undoubtedly emerging perspectives that would illuminate similar situations.