Abstract
Abstract Although language attitudes are frequently investigated, how these attitudes change over time is studied less frequently, despite providing an interesting window into the link between attitudes and ideologies. Conducted some twenty years since the first studies on this topic, the current study provides an updated perspective into language attitudes toward the use of Roman-alphabeted Greek (henceforth, Greeklish) in emails and SMS messages exchanged between Greek native speakers. Adapting the matched guise methodology commonly used in language attitude research to visual stimuli, we collected data from 60 participants of different ages and genders. Overall, their attitudes toward Greeklish were markedly negative, confirming negative attitudes already expressed twenty years prior but also extending them. We propose that technological and demographic but also ideological factors underlie the negative attitudes toward Greeklish expressed by Greek native speakers today.
Highlights
Borrowing a script developed to write down the sounds of one language to represent those of another is a recurring phenomenon across human history
A well-known case is Korean, which was originally written using Classical Chinese characters (Coulmas 1989, 115), while, closer to the topic at hand, the Greek script has been used to write down a form of Turkish spoken by the Karamanlides, a Greek-Orthodox, Turkish-speaking people native to Eastern Anatolia (Aytac 2014: 1)
Transliteration, that is, the one-to-one mapping of the graphemes of one writing system onto those of another (Wellisch 1975: x), has been evidenced within the context of Digitally-Mediated Communication ( DMC; Herring 2008: xxxvi), as speakers of languages not using the standard Roman character set supported by early internet technologies have needed to develop new and creative ways of writing to communicate online
Summary
Borrowing a script developed to write down the sounds of one language to represent those of another is a recurring phenomenon across human history. Transliteration, that is, the one-to-one mapping of the graphemes of one writing system onto those of another (Wellisch 1975: x), has been evidenced within the context of Digitally-Mediated Communication ( DMC; Herring 2008: xxxvi), as speakers of languages not using the standard Roman character set supported by early internet technologies have needed to develop new and creative ways of writing to communicate online This phenomenon has been studied for Hong Kong Cantonese (Lee 2007), Egyptian Arabic (Warschauer, El Said, & Zohry 2007; Palfreyman & Khalil 2007; Bjørnsson 2010), Russian (Mironovschi 2007), and Urdu (Shakeel, Karim, & Khan 2019). In recent years the use of Greeklish has become less prevalent (Androutsopoulos 2009: 247; Lees, Politis, & Koutsogiannis 2017: 67), this unregulated spelling can still be detected in DMC platforms today
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