Exploring linguistic hybridity and lexical creativity in the UK’s Greek Cypriot diaspora: the Grenglish Project

Abstract

We present findings from the Grenglish Project, a public engagement initiative that brought together members of the UK’s Greek Cypriot diaspora in a crowdsourcing effort to collect linguistic material that reflected the community’s linguistic history. After a brief sociohistorical overview of Cypriot migration to the UK, we present the types of material contributors submitted to the project website with reference to parallel developments in Greek migrant varieties spoken in other parts of the world. We focus on English loanwords that were integrated into the morphological system of Cypriot Greek by the addition of native derivational and inflectional suffixes like πάσον /páson/ ‘bus’ and πασέρης /paséris/ ‘bus driver’. We finally consider the implications of the project’s findings for the status of British Cypriot Greek as a variety on its own right and address the ideological and attitudinal factors that shape the prospects for its intergenerational transmission.