Group belonging beyond language boundaries: Language, religion and identity in the multilingual Greek community of Georgia
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Concha Maria Höfler
Abstract
In Georgia’s multilingual Greek community, the construction of belonging appears to be tied to religion and ancestry, with competence in Standard Modern Greek (SMG) not always being seen as necessary in order to “be Greek”. Forty-nine semi-structured interviews are analyzed, combining a quantitative and conversation analytical approach. Intriguingly, language competence in SMG does not always correlate with whether an interviewee deems this competence important for belonging to the Greek community. The interviews are embedded in their historical and socio-political context to elucidate the discursive resources interviewees may draw on when talking about the relationship between linguistic competence and belonging.
Acknowledgements
This research is supported by a PhD-scholarship by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung and the research project The impact of current transformational processes on language and ethnic identity: Urum and Pontic Greeks in Georgia led by Konstanze Jungbluth and Stavros Skopeteas and funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung. I am grateful to Nika Loladze for our shared fieldwork experiences and to Dominik Gerst, Tobias Heinze, Georg Höhn, Konstanze Jungbluth, Stavros Skopeteas and Rita Vallentin for their reading of and commenting on drafts of this article.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Urum and Pontic Greeks: Communities and language situations
- Greeks of Georgia: Main factors and motivations of emigration
- The issue of ethnic identity and aspects of cross-cultural orientation of the Greeks in Georgia (the example of Ts’alk’a Greeks)
- Group belonging beyond language boundaries: Language, religion and identity in the multilingual Greek community of Georgia
- Us and them: Inter- and intra-communal ethno-linguistic borders within the Pontic Greek community in Cyprus
- Morphological integration of Russian and Turkish nouns in Pontic Greek
- From double to dependent marking? An investigation of possessive constructions in Caucasian Urum
- From syntagmatic to paradigmatic spatial zeroes: The loss of the preposition se in inner Asia Minor Greek
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Urum and Pontic Greeks: Communities and language situations
- Greeks of Georgia: Main factors and motivations of emigration
- The issue of ethnic identity and aspects of cross-cultural orientation of the Greeks in Georgia (the example of Ts’alk’a Greeks)
- Group belonging beyond language boundaries: Language, religion and identity in the multilingual Greek community of Georgia
- Us and them: Inter- and intra-communal ethno-linguistic borders within the Pontic Greek community in Cyprus
- Morphological integration of Russian and Turkish nouns in Pontic Greek
- From double to dependent marking? An investigation of possessive constructions in Caucasian Urum
- From syntagmatic to paradigmatic spatial zeroes: The loss of the preposition se in inner Asia Minor Greek
