Attitudes towards the Greek Cypriot Dialect: Sociocultural implications

Abstract

Contrary to linguistic evidence, people still believe that some languages are more precise, beautiful and expressive than other languages and that some dialects are inferior, inexpressive and incomplete than their corresponding standard or official languages. Many studies have been carried out and several techniques have been employed in order to examine peoples' attitudes towards languages and varieties of languages. Some of the most common techniques include surveys and questionnaires, carrying out interviews, recording natural conversations and employing experimental manipulations. In the present study an experimental attempt was made to investigate Greek Cypriots' attitudes toward their native language, the Cypriot dialect, by employing the matched-guise technique. Twenty-two first-year Greek Cypriot students attending the University of Cyprus were selected to serve as subjects (judges) and evaluate the qualities of several speakers using the Cypriot dialect on one occasion (one guise) and Standard Modern Greek (SMG) on another occasion (the other guise). Judges' evaluation took the form of filling-in a table that included twelve traits such as kindness, intelligence, sincerity, depedability and sense of humor. The obtained results show that the SMG guises were rated more favorably than the Cypriot guises and an attempt is made to explore the sociocultural implications of these findings