Problems of Identity and Mutual Interference of the Language Code of the Wedding Ceremony of the Pomaks and Turks of the Xanthi Region in Greece

Abstract

This article examines the linguistic landscape of the Rhodopes in the Xanthi region, namely the symbiosis of Slavic, Turkish and Greek culture. The analysis of dialect narratives from Pomak and Turkish villages (Xanthi region, Greece) had the following objectives: 1) to clarify the identity of the cultural code of the wedding ceremony of the Pomaks and Turks; 2) to determine the correlation between the cultural and linguistic code features of the wedding ceremony of both communities; 3) to determine the degree of the incorporation of borrowings from contact languages into each of the idioms of the Pomaks and Turks; 4) to establish the degree of usage of L2 by both communities. The conclusion is made about the strong linguistic and cultural influence of the Turkish community on the Pomak ethno-religious group, about the tendency to improve the speech in L2 of both groups, as well as about the effectiveness of the analysis used to identificate the position of the Pomak and Turkish communities on the ethnolinguistic map of the Balkan Peninsula.