Μorphological Integration of Loan Words in Kaliardá

Abstract

This article deals with lexical borrowing and the morphological integration of loan words in Kaliardá, a Greek-based antilanguage, spoken in the urban areas of Greece by socially marginalized communities of cross-dressers, transgender people, and gay men. It is shown that the accommodation of most loans follows the general rules of Modern Greek morphology, namely, the stem-based word formation and compulsory inflection. However, for a considerable part of the borrowed items, there are certain morphological deviances compared to loan formation in Greek. More particularly, there is an overuse of the feminine grammatical gender, assigned to -human nouns, contrary to a neuterization tendency displayed by the Greek language, while the masculine grammatical gender is scarcely employed, and a significant number of feminine loans end in -o and -u in the citation form. Verbal loans do not substantially differ from those in Greek, with the exception of the frequent use of verbal periphrastic formations, consisting of an auxiliary inflected verb type, avélo or vuélo (both loans themselves), and a nominal item. Sometimes, avélo is also employed as a mediator for the integration of English verbs. The data under examination are drawn from a Kaliardá dictionary. Their accuracy is checked with 10 Kaliardá speakers in 2 big Greek cities, Athens and Patras, and they are enriched by a small oral corpus of 32 words collected through interviews. The investigated data comprise items from Italian, French and English, three principal donor languages in Kaliardá, but there are also loans from other languages, mainly from Romani and Turkish, but also from Albanian, German and Spanish.