Volume 69, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Urum and Pontic Greek: Languages and Communities, Issue Editors: Concha Maria Höfler, Stefanie Böhm, Konstanze Jungbluth and Stavros Skopeteas

Massive migration from Georgia started in the 1990s following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The majority of the migrants went abroad seeking jobs, and like other ethnic groups residing in Georgia, Greeks were actively involved in this process. Even though the driving factor of migration appears to be Georgia’s difficult economic situation, some official institutions looked upon this process as a form of repatriation. This article aims to establish the factors leading to the migration of Georgia’s Greeks, analyzes 42 interviews carried out during the research, and compares socio-economic conditions in Georgia with those in the countries of destination.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the issue of ethnic identity has gained in importance among Georgia’s multiethnic communities. Groups of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds faced the challenge of choosing a common language of communication, and they must address issues related to their ethno-cultural preferences. Using the example of Ts’alk’a Greeks – the largest Greek community in Georgia – this article discusses aspects of maintaining an ethnic identity in a multiethnic environment, and identifies visible trends of cross-cultural orientation. How do Greeks manage to preserve their ethnic identity, and what is their strategy based on? What determines the orientation of Greeks towards the different groups? The present study argues that culture (i. e. language, religion, traditions, customs, etc.) is crucial in this regard.

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.

In this study, the ethnic self-perception of Greeks from Russia and Georgia (alternatively known as Pontic Greeks) is examined in the socio-political context of Cyprus. I analyze the concept of mother tongue and the potential (symbolic) role it plays within the multilingual community of Pontic Greeks in Cyprus. The study demonstrates that the majority of Pontic Greeks both from Russia and Georgia ethnically self-identify as ‘Greeks’ while speaking different languages. Language plays a vital role in ethnic self-identification of some Pontic Greeks while for others the link between language and ethnicity appears to be insignificant. Interestingly, the ‘Greekness’ of some Pontic Greeks is questioned by the local population, which appears to be sensitive to the language-ethnicity link.

This article presents an empirical study on morphological integration of borrowed nouns in Pontic Greek. The data have been elicited from a corpus drawn from original fieldwork in Georgia. The aim of the paper was to identify whether there was an advantage associated with borrowing between languages of the same morphological type, i. e. non-concatenative (Russian) to non-concatenative (Pontic Greek). However, the research revealed that the phonological form of the loanword is decisive for the integration of Russian and Turkish nouns into PG, and not the morphological type. Additionally, we discuss some strategies of transfer which reveal the interaction between languages of different morphological types.

Speakers of the Turkic variety Caucasian Urum use different strategies for morphologically marking attributive possessive relations. This article presents the results of an experimental study conducted in Tbilisi with the aim of revealing if speakers systematically differentiate in their use of possession markers, and if so, if this is influenced by internal factors such as alienability of the word and complexity of the phrase. Furthermore, the speakers’ ages were taken into account. Results showed that in possessive constructions, it is especially the head-marking possessive suffix that is occasionally omitted. Post-hoc analysis showed the unexpected influence of alienability on single NP’s possessive marking, even in non-possessive constructions. The results lead to the assumption that the process of constructing possessive phrases is highly influenced by the contact language, Russian.

We trace the diachronic development of the preposition se in inner Asia Minor Greek from its use to mark a range of spatial functions to its ultimate loss and replacement by zero. We propose that, before spreading to all syntactic and semantic contexts, zero-marking was contextually-dependent on the presence/absence of a prenominal genitive modifying the head noun of Ground-encoding NPs and on the presence/absence of Region-encoding postpositions. We attribute these developments to an informational load relief strategy aimed at producing more economical utterances, as well as to language contact with Turkish, which favored structural convergence on the adpositional level between the two languages.