Nick Nicholas has been reporting at Facebook on his latest visit to his ancestral haunts in Crete (he lives in Australia and has been featured at LH many times, first in 2005), and this post expresses a particular form of linguistic distress I don’t recall seeing mentioned before:
There’s a melancholy in this visit, that wasn’t there the last couple of times. I had bits of it in Athens, and it’s been crystallised with a different trigger here in Sitia.
Through my thirties and forties, I’d come here and try to fit in, and be saddened when I realised that I wasn’t embraced as fully as I’d expect, that I didn’t fit in. People were not arseholes about it: this isn’t Italy or Ireland, where those who stayed behind have come to sneer at their diaspora. But there was always that recognition, five or ten minutes into a chat, that I wasn’t from these parts; or people that already knew me from online, addressing me as Nick and not Nikos. That hurt, the hurt of being left outside.
A couple of years ago, I made the decision not to try and fit it in. That turned out to work in my favour, because this country in the meantime has globalised enough, that I had more points of contact with Zoomer Greeks if I did not try so ha[r]d to be Greek the way I recalled and constructed, from Boomer Greeks.
It’s worked all too well. This time around in Athens, I didn’t feel reassured by all the English code-switching and American trends: I felt alienated. My construct of Greekness was itself now out of place in my environment. I had that feeling I increasingly have back home, to my persistent surprise, of being a fossil.
And that got worse in Sitia the one way that’s going to hit home for a trained dialectologist. I speak dialect when I come here. It comes unbidden, and it’s been a delight to realise it happening in the past. Not that my dialect was ever solid, and not that the dialect was doing that well even when I was a child, for me to have learned it: Leonidas Embirikos has reported to me that when he first visited this area in 1983—just before I’d left it for Australia—he found it remarkable how little-spoken the dialect was here already. And my aunts and uncles never did encourage what dialect I did speak—they thought it unseemly, of an educated man.
But that has only accelerated since. My Cretan, what little of it there is, has to be translated to my Gen Alpha relatives. I’m finding my impulse for ever more authentic morphology mostly met by a wall of Standard Greek, with only the occasional concession. Just two decent dialect speakers in my stay, the cab driver from Ag Nik, and a worker at the Post Office (not the one that served me). And God help me, I caught myself having the same “unseemly” reaction to their speech.
Hearing Cretan accents around me flicks the switch on in me to speak in dialect, but that switch doesn’t just flick on to activate antiquarianism and erudition, essential though those are to who I am. It flicks on to draw out a common identity: in a time when the dialect is dying fast, that’s what speaking in dialect means. And if my dialect is heavier than those I’m speaking to, it’s no longer working to that end. It’s working to isolate me instead of binding me to the community.
It’s making me a relic, the kind of person that I would myself be seeking out in another life, for information of what I recollect of the dialect. Which makes me feel not just isolated, but a fraud. I’m not from here, I’m not of this place: I should not be a last guardian of its legacy.
I still do it (μπορώ να τα στείλω τουτα-νέ; έναν καφέ θα πάρω, etc.), it comes out of me here like that, and it still feels at some level right to do so to me. The cabbie applauded it. But it feels hollow.
I cannot reconcile to the past I’ve inhabited passing, and to being out of place; and it’s no answer to try and be what I am not, either less Australian than I am, or for that matter less Cretan. I can only be aware of the traps I lay for myself, and try to dodge them.
(I’ve added a few links.) And here’s an interesting tidbit from another post:
One street up from brandy bar alley, Sitia, and there is a lot going on around Vincenzo Kornaros cultural house, named after the local poet. […] And right opposite the cultural house, a laundry goods store owned by someone of the same surname. With the first name Arianthe, and my grandmother had a neighbor with the same name: a vernacular refashioning of the Cretan name Ariadne.
Reminds me of Russian folk versions like Arina for Irina and Alyona for Elena.
Funny, I just had a similar conversation today in La Spezia about dialects. Across Italy dialects seem to be vanishing quickly. I am vacationing in a somewhat isolated hill town where the inhabitants used to speak an interesting dialect on the linguistic boundary between Spezzino, a type of Ligurian, and Lunigianese, an Emilian language. But now no one under 70 seems to speak it natively, if at all.
Even in the Veneto or Sicily where people claim to be proud of their local languages I rarely hear them spoken in public. The Italian man I was discussing this with mentioned that Italian Americans from Calabria or Campania will show up in Italy speaking their grandparents’ dialects, languages that are now practically extinct among younger people. From his point of view this was more absurdly funny than sad. Although I have heard the sentiment from older people that something important has been lost now that dialects are moribund.
Maybe they should start spending a lot of money on saving the dialects as soon as they’re sure it’s too late.
Is any jurisdiction taking effective steps to preserve dialects? Norway maybe?
A somewhat earlier (mid-20th-century) Australian view of Crete:
“Say Crete, and there is little more to tell
Of muddle tall as treachery, despair
And black defeat resounding like a bell;
“But bring the magnifying focus near
And in contempt of muddle and defeat
The old heroic virtues still appear.”
Which makes me wonder whether “despair” actually rhymes with near & appear in some variety of AustEng or if Manifold was leaning on his poetic license.
Oh, that’s where he’s disappeared to. 🙁
In Norway they’re not endangered.
The linked Wikipedia article claims: “Many organisations of Cretans aim to preserve their culture, including their dialect; as such, the dialect does not seem to be in danger of extinction.” Oh dear.
The talk page, however, contains a link to Nick Nicholas’s thesis!
In Norway they’re not endangered.
OK, but maybe government policy helps to maintain that state of affairs? Prevention is better than cure.
For example, in some countries, where a teacher trains and where they end up working may bear no relation to where they grew up. If teachers don’t speak the dialect of their students that might foment dialect leveling.
Many organisations of Cretans aim to preserve their culture, including their dialect; as such, the dialect does not seem to be in danger of extinction
That “as such” seems to me to be somewhat naive.
And languages and dialects (and cultures) which are not in danger* of extinction tend not to produce organisations aiming to preserve them.
It’s notable that the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Language_Society
was founded in 1962, not 1862.
(I am delighted to discover that its chairman is Joseff Gnagbo, born in Côte d’Ivoire, who first came here as an asylum seeker displaced by the Ivoirean civil war. Good for him, good for the Cymdeithas, and good for Plaid Cymru, for whom he’s standing for the Senedd.)
* Genuine danger, that is: not the kind of manufactured pseudo-threats pushed by far-right xenophobes and bigots.
Good point; I didn’t think of that. However, it wouldn’t automatically lead to the students no longer speaking their dialect with each other. Something extra would still be needed – for example “they thought it unseemly, of an educated man”.
“People were not arseholes about it: this isn’t Italy or Ireland, where those who stayed behind have come to sneer at their diaspora.”
I am not saying this is entirely false, at least for Ireland. But I think it is mostly false. I would say that
A. Irish sneer at one another much more than at the diaspora or other nationalities (see begrudgery).
B. Slanging is not sneering, although both come under passive aggression. Slanging stops if the person responds in a good-humoured way (or just says something like “really, that’s amazing!” in a naively worshipful tone); sneering is more persistent.
I would think the residual population of Scotland might not have entirely positive attitudes toward visiting persons of diasporic Scottishness but is perhaps too busily engaged in selling them tartan-themed tat to say that out loud?
Of course diasporic Scots (except in Northern Ireland) generally don’t speak any sort of Scots dialect, except to the extent that their own regional variety of English happens to have some Scotticisms in it.
I don’t think this is entirely a simple thing. People behaving like Scottish stereotypes on the other side of the world is one thing, and completely up to them. People coming here to tell us we’re doing being Scottish wrong is another.
From their point of view they might well say that they were preserving Scottish culture. To an extent they might even be right. And it’s fine if you do generally behave that way now – I’m definitely not saying anything about Nova Scotians simply behaving like Nova Scotians, for example. That’s just them. But you can’t really go anywhere and behave the way you would have behaved 20 or 50 years ago, or (you think) your ancestors would have behaved 200 years ago, and expect to fit in.
(You can’t stay *here* and behave the way you would have behaved 20 or 50 years ago and expect to fit in, for that matter.)
We’ve talked about expats speaking their native language as it was spoken when they left before, but I think the dialect angle is a new one. Although we have definitely talked about collecting rare languages in big cities elsewhere, and it’s an interesting question how those speakers might differ from people who stayed behind.
(I was quite confused by that sentence, because people who stayed behind have surely not come (or gone) anywhere. But I did eventually see what was meant!)
This article on Gbagbo says his first language is French, but that he also speaks English, Italian, German, Swahili, and now Welsh. He emigrated as an adult. How common is it for Ivoiriens to grow up speaking no African language? How common is it for West Africans to know Swahili?
David M.: In Norway they’re not endangered.
Well. I’d say “In Norway the demise of the dialects is one or two generations behind other countries in Western Europe.”
mollymooly: OK, but maybe government policy helps to maintain that state of affairs? Prevention is better than cure.
Sure. Public policy, and a culture of accepting – and expecting – dialect use in the highest echelons of society. But all that comes down to the existence of Nynorsk – or, if you prefer, of two alternative (and rather loose) written norms – and how that has opened a wide space of possibilities in public speech.
Sorry, Gnagbo, not Gbagbo.
How common is it for Ivoiriens to grow up speaking no African language? How common is it for West Africans to know Swahili?
Not common at all, for both, at least for the country as a whole. But Gnagbo seems to be originally from Abidjan, so he may well actually be L1 Francophone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abidjan#Demographics
This link
https://www.bangor.ac.uk/events/from-the-ivory-coast-to-wales-talk-with-joseph-gnagbo
says he knew “seven languages” before learning Welsh, which suggests a couple of African languages at least to me. I wouldn’t be totally surprised if “Swahili” is some reporter’s misunderstanding, based on not actually having heard of any other African language. (The brief accounts of the Ivoirean civil war in the various news snippets about Gnagbo don’t seem to reflect a lot of knowledge of Côte d’Ivoire.)
I think Gnagbo is a Bété name, though I certainly wouldn’t swear to it; I can’t find much about his background, but he seems to have been a fairly high-profile supporter of Laurent Gbagbo (hence the fear of persecution under Alassane Ouattara.)
This article says, “While living in the city of Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, Joseff worked at a university where he specialised in linguistics. Joseff taught Italian, German and English to French speakers and French to English speakers. In addition, he learnt Swahili and had knowledge of Arabic, Russian and Bambara.” Here it says he lived in Kenya at a point in his life.
That would certainly explain the Swahili.
Bambara and Dyula are of course dialects of the same language, and he may well have picked up Dyula in Abidjan.
That’s more informative than any of the other articles I found, anyhow (though it still doesn’t say where his family originally came from.)
I hold no brief for Alassane Ouattara whatsoever, but the account of the second Ivoirean civil war is pretty slanted: presumably the reporter simply repeated Gnagbo’s account of the matter (you can hardly blame Gnagbo himself for being partisan, in the circumstances.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Ivorian_crisis
Sure. Public policy, and a culture of accepting – and expecting – dialect use in the highest echelons of society.
I think the latter is key. As soon as speaking dialect involves shame, the downward spiral begins. As long as you have a mostly agricultural society where most people spend most of the time with other locals, a situation where dialect is for the peasants and “better” people speak standard may be stable, but that breaks down with a modern society where people dream of having careers in the city and outsiders move into the countryside because housing is cheaper. I have observed the last stages of this for Low German in Northern Germany – children were taught to speak High German in school, and speakers of LG only spoke it with other native speakers; when newcomers like us tried to speak it, people found it funny and switched to High German. I think the local children of my age group were one of the last to learn LG at home; I remember teacher friends of my parents remarking in the 90s on how children had stopped speaking LG in the schoolyard during breaks. There are some attempts to preserve LG in the last 30 years or so, with occasional programs on the radio and LG instruction in schools, but I think it’s too late.
You can’t stay *here* and behave the way you would have behaved 20 or 50 years ago and expect to fit in, for that matter.
Quoted for truth, as the kids (used to?) say on the net. It’s just that change happens gradually when you stay in one place, while you notice things more sharply when you move away and come back.
I’ve met such a person.
@Hans : interesting that you date the death (or downfall) of Low German that late. My parents came from the Teufelsmoor (I love that name) region between Bremen and Hamburg. They spoke Standard German, without any Northern German accent, and so did most of the people in their generation, with the difference that those who had stayed in Northern Germany had the typical North German accent. When I was small and we were visiting there (this must have been in the early/mid 1960s), I noticed that some of the older people (my grandparents’ generation, born at the end of the 19th century) spoke in a language I couldn’t understand at all. That was of course Low German. So the change from Low German to a locally coloured form of Standard German happened in the generation of my parents (born in the 1920s). Of course this was the influence of Church and school (my parents had very colorful anecdotes about the protestant pastor at the time), but they were not invented in the early 20th century. Radio (and later television) may have played a role, too.
Anyway, I grew up in the Rheinland, but I never spoke the local dialect. In fact, I didn’t encounter it until I was 10 or 11. I went to a protestant school in a largely catholic region, so most kids in elementary school were from families who had immigrated in the 1950s, like my parents. There was a lot of internal migration in Germany in the 1940s/50s, and this, along with school, church and mass media, may have helped the spread of the active use of Standard German. It was simply the language that was understood everywhere.
I remember how one family, living in the same apartment building as my family, changed from dialect to (a form of) Standard German. The father, a mason, spoke such heavy Rhenish dialect that I had a lot of trouble understanding him. His children very quickly changed over to Standard German, especially when a lot of immigrants (of various countries of origin) came into our neighbourhood; their children usually spoke Standard German. By that time, dialect had become useless as a means of communication, it only survived in the folklore of the Rheinischer Karneval – a Büttenrede has to have at least some traces of dialect;but I remember Karnevalslieder from the 1970s fully in Standard German.
Another, recent (sort of), experience: the radio played a couple of recordings of Thomas Mann, from the early 1930s and the 1950s, reading introductions to his favourite pieces of classical music. There was hardly any difference to my own language (and what difference there was, was probably due to the fact that Mann wasn’t speaking spontaneously, but reading texts he had prepared beforehand).
They are why I, and everyone around me, was fluent in Standard German before entering school (late 80s); it still wouldn’t have occurred to us to talk artificially like that in daily life.
(We did just that, though, when playing characters from TV or comic books like the Teenage Mutant Ninja/Hero Turtles. Lameen has reported similar things from the Arabic-speaking world.)
@ulr: you’re right, the death of dialect happened at different times across Northern Germany. What I described is the situation specifically in Ostfriesland, where I grew up. As far as I can see, it’s one of the areas where Low German held out longer. There also the influx of refugees after WWII played a role, plus people going to work in other parts of Germany – there were people working throughout the week in Baden-Württemberg or Bavaria and coming home only for the weekends. And from the 80s, there was an influx of people from Nordrhein-Westfalen and Berlin buying houses for retirement, as houses were dirt cheap compared to other parts of Germany.
But you still had in the 70s and 80s young people growing up speaking Platt in Ostfriesland, while around Mönchengladbach on the Lower Rhine, where my grandparents lived, Platt at that time was only spoken anymore by a small number of people in their 50s and above, mostly farmers.
As for Kölsch, my impression is that it held up reasonably well into the 80s, with even Turkish immigrants learning it and a sufficiently large pool of fluent speakers to produce carnival songs and even a successful beyond Cologne rock band like BAP, but when I walk through Cologne these days, I rarely overhear people speaking it, and never young people, so to me it seems it’s nowadays mostly kept alive as a bit of a poetic register language for carnival. But Stu probably can say more, he actually lives there.
[in] Cologne these days, I rarely overhear people speaking it [Kölsch] and never young people, so to me it seems it’s nowadays mostly kept alive as a bit of a poetic register language for carnival
Yes. In public nowadays I hear only old people speaking Kölsch. On the streets, in shops etc
For Karneval the airwaves turn Kölsch, just as for Christmas they carry the old American standards like White Christmas and Baby It’s Cold Outside (now ostracized in the US, I learn).
But is this still the working class dialect Johanna Schopenhauer in the 1820s found almost incomprehensible? In the 1960s the Volkstheater of Willy Millowitsch was extremely popular on German TV, and they protested against people characterising their language as “Cologne dialect” — if they had used real dialect, nobody outside of Cologne would have understood it (Hamburgs Ohnesorgtheater, equally popular, issued an analogous statement, I think). The language I heard people speak in Cologne in the late 1970s and the 1980s was usually Deutsche Umgangssprache with a local colouring in pronunciation and a few specifically Cologne words and expressions. Real deep dialect was already rare.
Me: dialect use in the highest echelons of society
Did I write ‘echelons’? Apparently so.
It’s easy to tell where that came from. I’m reading Dagfinn Skre’s The Northern Routes to Kingship: A History of Scandinavia AD 180-550.
–
The discussion of Kölsch reminds me that there’s a trade-off between acceptance of dialect and (untainted) preservation. Lifting the dialect out of the local speech community inevitably means that it will be more exposed ti the gravitational pull of the larger linguistic area.
Nick Nicholas: People were not arseholes about it: this isn’t Italy or Ireland, where those who stayed behind have come to sneer at their diaspora.
PlasticPaddy: I am not saying this is entirely false, at least for Ireland. But I think it is mostly false.
I would say it’s mostly false for Italy, too. I was relieved when people here began to have some notion of what Rudy Giuliani was really like rather than being vaguely proud of him as a famous Italian American. I also had no idea until I lived there that, say, Jon Bon Jovi or Ronnie James Dio were originally Bongiovi and Padavona, respectively, whereas Italians tend to be aware of things like that and quick to be pleased about it when they admire someone or to joke about it when they don’t. I get asked all the time whether I moved here because of Italian roots (even though I don’t look the part), and it never seems as if the person inquiring is looking for an opportunity to sneer. Plus, it’s not as if one either emigrated or was left behind. Many, many Italians went abroad for a while and then came back. And many, many Italians are delighted to keep up ties with their second or third cousins overseas.
People may indeed find it funny if members of the diaspora assume that their great-grandparents’ dialect or their grandma’s recipes will be recognized by the average Italian, but I wouldn’t call that sneering.
But is this still the working class dialect Johanna Schopenhauer in the 1820s found almost incomprehensible?
Hard to say, as I wasn’t around in 1820 🙂
In the 1960s the Volkstheater of Willy Millowitsch was extremely popular on German TV, and they protested against people characterising their language as “Cologne dialect” — if they had used real dialect, nobody outside of Cologne would have understood it (Hamburgs Ohnesorgtheater, equally popular, issued an analogous statement, I think).
I remember both, and both were basically dialect-colored regiolect.
The language I heard people speak in Cologne in the late 1970s and the 1980s was usually Deutsche Umgangssprache with a local colouring in pronunciation and a few specifically Cologne words and expressions. Real deep dialect was already rare.
One issue is that dialect speakers in situations where dialect-speaking is seen as low-prestige often switch to something like what you describe when non-dialect speakers are around, and any unknown person is by default a non-dialect speaker. So to hear real dialect, one would have to be a dialect speaker oneself or to be able to overhear speakers when they felt “safe” or didn’t care whether they were overheard.
If we take carnival songs or the texts of BAP, the basic vocabulary and grammar are Kölsch, but there are a lot of loans from Standard German and a lot of the phraseology is Standard German as well.
I haven’t lived in England for nearly 40 years, and I suspect that many of the RP speakers I meet think that my English is a living fossil, as I haven’t been influenced by the youf of today, and talk the way RP speakers did 40 years ago. I use English every day, but not for talking to English people — my wife, as her English is better than my Spanish; our daughter, whose English is better than my French or Spanish. She is totally and effortlessly trilingual. I wish I was. She can also make a lot of sense of spoken Portuguese, Catalan, Italian and even Romanian.
The Atlantic just published a relevant article on the disappearance of the U.S. „Southern“ accent among young people. Basically anecdotal but interesting:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/southern-accent-linguistics-speech/685350/
It’s the same throughout the country, I think, with every region trending toward a moderately Californiated General American. The classic non-rhotic accents are definitely recessive here in the Northeast, for instance. Nonetheless, the popular wisdom in certain online venues remains that actually regional accents are diverging in new ways – based essentially on the pop-linguistic account of the Northern Cities shift, as if that wasn’t canonized half a century ago and hasn’t already crested.
The mid 20th century had an interesting effect on white Southern accents, with an urge to differentiate from black speech being the likely motivator for two changes – a fronting of /oʊ/ and an abrupt loss of non-rhoticity – of which the latter moved things closer to GenAm, and the former further away. In our times I think the most lasting relic of Southern speech will be the pen-pin merger: it’s naturally harder to pick a distinction back up than to drop one, and – unlike rhoticity – this one is perceptually subtle enough to evade many people’s notice.