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Shortlisted for the 2010 Runciman Award awarded by the Anglo-Hellenic League
Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976
Peter Mackridge
416 pages
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Maps
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234x156mm
978-0-19-959905-9
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Paperback
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18 November 2010
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- Written by the world's leading authority
- Well-placed narrative account
- Based on original research
This is a history of the great language controversy that has occupied and empassioned Greeks - sometimes with fatal results - for over two hundred years. It begins in the late eighteenth-century when a group of Greek intellectuals sought to develop a new, Hellenic, national identity alongside the traditional identity supplied by Orthodox Christianity. The ensuing controversy focused on the language, fuelled on the one hand by a desire to develop a form of Greek that expressed the Greeks' relationship to the ancients, and on the other by the different groups' contrasting notions of what the national image so embodied should be. The purists wanted a written language close to the ancient. The
vernacularists - later known as demoticists - sought to match written language to spoken, claiming the latter to be the product of the unbroken development of Greek since the time of Homer. Peter Mackridge explores the political, social, and linguistic causes and effects of the controversy in its many manifestations. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from literature, language, history, and anthropology, he traces its effects on spoken and written varieties of Greek and shows its impact on those in use today. He describes the efforts of linguistic elites and the state to achieve language standardization and independence from languages such as Turkish, Albanian, Vlach, and Slavonic.
This is a timely book. The sense of national and linguistic identity that has been
inculcated into generations of Greeks since the start of the War of Independence in 1821 has, in the last 25 years, received blows from which it may not recover. Immigration from Eastern Europe and elsewhere has introduced new populations whose religions, languages, and cultures are transforming Greece into a country quite different from what it has been and to what it once aspired to be.Readership: All those interested in the modern history of Greece and Asia Minor; the history of modern Greek; and the relationship between language and national identity, including historians, linguists, anthropologists, and political scientists.
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Peter Mackridge, Emeritus Professor of Modern Greek, Oxford
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"Mackridge has absorbed [such] recent work not only in linguistics but also history and cultural studies and it informs his new book, which is the fruit of a whole career pondering the language. It is probably the most comprehensive and authoritative account of the development of the Greek language (or languages) since the late 18th century." - Michael Llewellyn Smith, Anglo-Hellenic Review
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Preface
Transliteration from Greek and pronunciation of Greek Words
Maps and illustrations
Acknowledgements
1: Theoretical background
2: The preconditions for the Greek language controversy
3: The early stages of the controversy, 1766-1804
4: Adamantios Korais as language reformer
5: Alternative proposals to Korais' project, 1804-1830
6: Language in the two Greek states, 1830-1880
7: The beginning of the demoticist campaign, 1880-1897
8: Educational demoticism and political reform, 1897-1922
9: The political polarization of the language question, 1922-1976
10: Epilogue
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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