• 1 Koinova 2018, p. 1259.
• 2 Ioannidou 2017.

1Diasporic communities are sometimes perceived, not only by outsiders but also by their own members, as inward-looking groups that are frozen in time, “reflecting visions of a homeland, nation-state, or version of a language tied to a specific point of time in history, when refugees or migrants departed from the homeland”.1 Such perceptions are often corroborated, reinforced and reproduced – especially among people based in the migrants’ societies of origin and/or people with limited or even no familiarity with diasporic life – by alluding to the maintenance and continued practicing in diasporic settings of aspects of cultural expression that may be no longer practiced in the societies of origin. Or, if such aspects are indeed still practiced, they may be viewed and even stigmatised in anachronistic and classed terms. So‑called ‘villagey’ and ‘heavy’ forms of Cypriot Greek as well as sociocultural practices such as the pinning of money on the clothes of the bride and groom as part of wedding celebrations (“πλούμισμα του αντροΰνου”)2 are occasionally used in this way as illustrative examples to construct a backward image of the UK’s Greek Cypriot diaspora, known in Greek as the κυπριακή παροικία.

• 3 Canagarajah 2017, Capstick 2021.
• 4 Blommaert 2010, Blommaert, Rampton 2015.
• 5 Busch 2012, Busch 2015.

2In this article, we present findings emerging from the Grenglish Project, a public engagement initiative that brought together members of the UK’s παροικία in a crowdsourcing effort to collect linguistic material that reflected the linguistic history of the Greek Cypriots who migrated to the UK. The aim is to create a permanent record of Cypriot Greek as it has developed in the country not only for documentation purposes but also as a point of reference for people associated with the community to explore the interplay of language, migration, identity and history and to reminisce about their own experiences. Here, we position our contribution in the frame of current advances in the study of language and migration,3 the sociolinguistics of globalisation,4 and the linguistic repertoire approach to multilingualism.5 We view both language and migration as dynamic processes that shape each other in complex ways. Multilingual speakers are not the embodiment of two (or more) monolinguals, who speak a number of named languages that are kept separate by impermeable structural boundaries. Rather, multilingual speakers have rich and varied linguistic repertoires, consisting of linguistic resources that they acquire at different spatiotemporal points along their life courses and, in the case of speakers with a migration background, different points along their migration trajectories. Multilingual speakers draw on these resources in a free and productive manner in everyday linguistic practices and processes of meaning-making. These may include the creative mixing of features originating in different sets of resources (traditionally viewed as separate languages), which can become symbolic indexes of identity and belonging both on the level of the individual speaker and that of imagined and reified communities.

• 6 Mettis 2001, p. 284.
• 7 Christodoulou 1959.
• 8 Constantinou 1990.
• 9 Smith, Varnava 2017.
• 10 Pavlakis 2002.

4According to Mettis, John Thymides (Ιωάννης Θεμιστοκλή Θυμίδης, also known as Stavros Thymides) is the first Greek Cypriot known to have migrated to the UK around the year 1900.6 1902 is, however, conventionally taken in the literature as the onset of Cypriot migration to the UK with the first emigrants leaving Cyprus after an extensive drought that made life in the impoverished rural areas of the island even more difficult.7 Migratory flows to the UK remained rather restricted until the early 1930s, when colonial reports first mentioned England as a destination for Cypriot emigrants.8 By the end of the decade, a small Cypriot community had been formed in Central London’s West End (Soho, Fitzrovia, Camden Town), consisting primarily of men who worked in the hospitality sector as waiters and kitchen porters but also as sailors in the East End docks and lace merchants.9 Between 1955 and 1959, the armed clashes between British colonial forces and the Greek Cypriot nationalist guerrilla organisation EOKA (National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) as part of the struggle for Enosis with Greece and subsequent clashes between EOKA and the Turkish Cypriot, pro-partition TMT (Turkish Resistance Organisation) led to a total of 29,315 people emigrating from Cyprus, 24,792 (or 85%) of whom emigrated to the UK.10 This wave was facilitated by the partial lifting of migration controls that the British government had previously imposed on Cyprus.

• 11 Pavlakis 2002.
• 12 Constantinou 1990.
• 13 George, Millerson 1967.

5Emigration from Cyprus to the UK peaked during the first three years of the newly independent Republic of Cyprus. Between 1960 and 1963, 37,288 Cypriots left the island, an increase of 21% compared to the previous period. 33,028 (or 89%) people migrated to the UK,11 which had by now become the most preferred destination of Cypriot emigrants, a position that it retains to the present day. The “mass exodus”12 of the early years of independence has been linked to a high rate of unemployment in Cyprus combined with the passing of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which would limit the rights of Commonwealth citizens to live and work in the UK. Cypriots who had arrived in the 1930s-1950s were another significant pull factor. In 1964, there were 78,476 Cypriots in the UK (including people who had migrated themselves and their children), a marked increase compared to 1951, when the total amounted to 10,208 people.13 Another exodus took place in the aftermath of the 1974 war, with 1976 seeing 5,647 Cypriots emigrating. However, this time the UK was not the favoured destination, with only 726 people (or 13%) relocating there. Economic recovery and relative political stability in Cyprus eventually drove emigration numbers down by the mid-1980s.

• 14 Cylwik 2002.
• 15 Anthias 1992.
• 16 Li, Zhu 2013; Li 2018.

6London has consistently attracted the bulk of Cypriot emigrants throughout the various periods of Cypriot emigration to the UK.14 As their settlement in the British capital started to become permanent, extended family units were established and the occupational range of emigrants was broadened.15 Large numbers of women worked as dressmakers, predominantly at home but also in factories, while men worked as tailors, shoemakers, barbers and hairdressers. Family-run catering businesses like grocery shops, cafés and restaurants were another popular source of income as was the textiles industry. At the same time, there was a northward movement from Central London into the Boroughs of Islington and Haringey, following a path that has been associated in popular culture with London Buses route 29 and key stops along the way including Finsbury Park, Green Lanes, Turnpike Lane and Wood Green. Later expansions saw Cypriots move into Enfield and Barnet, where large numbers reside today particularly in Palmers Green, Southgate and Winchmore Hill as well as in Finchley. Less sizeable Cypriot communities are found in major cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool, and in towns including Weston-Super-Mare, Hastings, Great Yarmouth and Mansfield. Extended families are at the core of everyday community life, which is underpinned by all types of “diaspora pillars”16 such as community associations of different types, complementary schools, sports clubs, community media such as the Parikiaki newspaper and London Greek Radio, parishes of the UK’s Greek Orthodox Church and a broad range of commercial and recreational establishments that serve as socialisation hubs for members of the community.

• 17 Anthias 1990, Constantinides 1990, Constantinou 1990, Charlauti 2006, Pavlakis 2002.
• 18 Vryonides 2017.

7The exact number of people with a Cypriot background in today’s UK is understandably difficult to establish with certainty and accuracy. More modest estimates put the figure at 150,000 people, while more generous ones put it at 300,000 individuals.17 These numbers do not typically include Cypriot students who come to the UK to pursue undergraduate and postgraduate studies at university or Cypriot professionals of the so‑called brain drain who either migrate to or stay in the UK after completing their studies in order to secure employment in highly-skilled sectors.18 The numbers above generally attempt to capture the size of the so‑called κυπριακή παροικία, the long-established diasporic community that developed out of the Cypriot emigrants of the mid-20th century. If students and professionals create and maintain social networks and connections with other Cypriots in the UK, these are often outside the παροικία.

• 19 Christodoulou-Pipis 1991, Gardner-Chloros 1992.

8Members of the UK’s Greek Cypriot παροικία are multilingual and have rich and complex linguistic repertoires that encompass both standardised and non-standardised varieties of English and Greek. As far as English is concerned, they use Standard English and non-standardised English varieties associated with their (socio)linguistic biographies such as Brummie, Cockney or even Multicultural London English, especially younger generations. In terms of Greek, community members use predominantly Cypriot Greek in everyday communication and Standard Greek in more formal instances such as in public events, community media, complementary schools and the church. Competences in these languages and varieties differ across age groups with older, Cyprus-born speakers being dominant in (Cypriot) Greek and often having a rudimentary knowledge of English.19 UK‑born speakers, especially those belonging to the so‑called third or even fourth generations in that both their parents and grandparents were born in the UK, tend to be dominant in English. Among these groups, we find an extensive amount of heterogeneity in competence and degree of use of Greek both across different speakers and even within single speakers along different points in their lifetimes. Overgeneralising somewhat, Cypriot Greek will be the variety they will be most likely to be familiar with, having been naturally exposed to it since birth at their homes and within their local community networks. Sustained exposure to Standard Greek will normally be through Greek complementary schools that operate in the UK, Greek-speaking media and online as well as through interactions with speakers from Greece.

• 20 McEntee-Atalianis, Pouloukas 2001; Gardner-Chloros, McEntee-Atalianis, Finnis 2005; Georgakopoulou, (...)
• 21 Karatsareas 2019.

9Like many other languages, Cypriot Greek did not ‘freeze’ in time when it was transplanted from Cyprus to the UK by the early Cypriot migrants. Rather, it continued to develop and did so in a unique way, gradually acquiring an interesting combination of linguistic features.20 Karatsareas has identified:21

• 22 Potowski 2013, Alvanoudi 2019.
• 23 Anaxagorou 1990.
• 24 Papapavlou, Pavlou 2001, cf. Gardner-Chloros, McEntee-Atalianis, Finnis 2005.
• 25 Hadjidemetriou 2015.
• 26 Karatsareas 2018, Karatsareas 2020.

10In diasporic communities, language shift from the so‑called home, heritage or community language to the majority language of the host society typically occurs within two or three generations.22 The UK’s Greek Cypriot παροικία is no exception in that respect. Anaxagorou predicted that Cypriot Greek would not be maintained past the second generation.23 This was later confirmed on the basis of quantitative evidence showing that UK‑born adolescents speak English with most members of their families with the sole exception of their grandparents with whom they used Greek.24 More recent research has corroborated the finding that English is perceived as the first and dominant language for everyday interactions within the community.25 In addition to English, pressure on Cypriot Greek is also exerted by Standard Greek and ideological associations that view the former as a ‘dialect’ as opposed to a ‘language on its own right’ and especially as a ‘heavy’, ‘villagey’, ‘incorrect’ or even ‘broken’ linguistic form or ‘slang’ whose intergenerational transmission is not encouraged and whose use is to be avoided even in informal settings such as the home.26

• 27 Papapavlou 1998, Papapavlou 2002.
• 28 Tsiplakou 2004, p. 3; Terkourafi 2005, p. 326; Arvaniti 2006-2010, p. 18.
• 29 Charalambidou 2015, p. 122.
• 30 Pavlou 2004, p. 11.
• 31 Papapavlou, Sophocleous 2009.
• 32 Goutsos, Karyolemou 2004, p. 7; Tsiplakou et al. 2006, p. 266.
• 33 Terkourafi 2005, p. 326.

11To a certain extent, these perceptions reflect ideologies that are found in the original context of Cyprus, where the two varieties are associated with a set of distinct values. Matched-guise tests have shown that speakers of Cypriot Greek regarded speakers of Standard Greek as more educated, modern, pleasant, intelligent, interesting. In contrast, Cypriot Greek speakers were regarded as less educated but friendlier, more sincere and more humorous.27 There is also a binary distinction between ‘town speech’ and ‘village speech’.28 ‘Village speech’ (χωρκάτικα) is the basilect of the dialect continuum and is stereotypically associated with low levels of education, rural areas and old age,29 whereas ‘town speech’ is the acrolectal variety of Cypriot Greek.30 Speakers are aware of the different points of the continuum of Cypriot Greek and often perceive themselves as speakers of a mesolectal variety.31 In practice there is a continuum of usage between local Standard Greek, acrolectal and basilectal Cypriot Greek and different registers can be employed agentively for a range of communicative purposes.32 For example, Terkourafi has shown that the variations of Cypriot Greek rather than being associated with the rural-urban continuum, are more related to register shifts: more basilectal varieties index a more informal style and more acrolectal varieties a more formal style.33

• 34 Adalar, Tagliamonte 1998.
• 35 Androutsopoulos 2012; Xydopoulos, Tzortzatou, Archakis 2019; Evripidou 2020.

13The motivation to embark on the Grenglish Project was based on initial observations about the distinct character that Cypriot Greek had developed in London’s Greek Cypriot παροικία and the fervent interest and attention it received from community members on social media. For the purposes of our project, we chose the term “Grenglish”, as it is most often encountered in social media to describe the British variety of Cypriot Greek and, as a portmanteau word, indexes the hybridity between (a variety of) Greek and English. We did not opt for alternatives that were suggested to us, such as “Cypglish” as the term would imply that the only language of Cyprus is Cypriot Greek, erasing the other languages of the island, especially Cypriot Turkish that developed in parallel ways in the UK diaspora.34 Also, we discounted “Greeklish”, as the term has been associated since the 1990s with Standard Greek or Cypriot Greek written in the Roman alphabet (typically in the context of digitally written language).35

• 36 For internet-based crowdsourcing of language data, see Leemann et al. 2016, p. 2.
• 37 Spilioti, Tagg 2017, p. 166.

15Our main tool for both data collection and community engagement was a dedicated project website (https://www.grenglish.org), which was built on a custom Drupal platform and is hosted by Amazon. We chose to use our custom-made website rather than mine data from social media as we wanted to encourage the active engagement of the community with the project.36 We also wanted to ensure that the contributors gave us their informed consent to use their data, as participants’ expectations of publicness/privacy vary greatly within and across social media sites.37 We also created a dedicated Twitter account (@GrenglishProj) and used that as well as existing networks and contacts to publicise the project. In public calls for contributions, we invited speakers of Cypriot Greek in the UK to upload what they understood as ‘Grenglish’ material, including words and their meanings; photographs of things, places, events, activities that have something to do with Grenglish; stories that involve the use of Grenglish in the UK, Cyprus or elsewhere; and, thoughts, comments or feelings about Grenglish.

• 38 https://www.grenglish.org (accessed 29 November 2020).
• 39 https://www.grenglish.org/#project (accessed 29 November 2020).
• 40 Gluckman 1961, p. 9.
• 41 Mitchell 1984, Andrews 2017.

16On the website, we did not elaborate on the exact definition of ‘Grenglish’, we did however provide two brief definitions in passing that pointed to morphologically integrated loanwords. In the homepage, we referred to Grenglish words as “English words that the UK’s Greek Cypriots borrowed from English and turned into Greek”38 and in the ‘About’ section we referred to the “borrowing of English words and their incorporation into the Cypriot Greek grammatical system”.39 As “one good case can illuminate the workings of a social system in a way that a series of morphological statements cannot achieve”,40 we foregrounded some telling41 examples in the project’s website written in the Roman alphabet exclusively (in the home page) and also in both the Greek and Roman alphabets (in the ‘About’ section). These included:

• 42 Mackenzie 2017, p. 299.

18All contributions to the website were automatically publicly visible. We also posted to the website contributions we received via email (provided the email senders gave their permission) and on Twitter. Adopting a reflexive-linguistic approach to internet research ethics,42 informants’ full names or Twitter usernames were concealed before email and Twitter contributions were posted to the website. The website afforded us the opportunity to export all contributions in an Excel spreadsheet. This database formed the raw data of this article.

• 43 Postalveolar fricatives [ʒ] and [ʃ] are transcribed here as ζι and σι, if they are followed by a vo (...)
• 44 Bucholtz 2000, p. 1461.
• 45 Ochs 1979, p. 44.

22Without accompanied oral data, it is hard to determine whether and to what extent the various transcriptions represent different phonological realisations or result from adherence to different orthographic conventions. For the purposes of this article, we have opted to present the words submitted with the Greek alphabet, including noting the Cypriot Greek phonemes that do not constitute part of the phonological inventory of Standard Greek employing the most commonly used, although far from standardised, orthographic conventions.43 This a naturalised transcription44 that conforms to written discourse conventions (e.g., spelling) and is thus accessible to the untrained reader. The direct correlation between (combinations of) letters and phonemes of the Greek writing system allows us to circumvent the idiosyncrasies of the English orthographic system. Of course, every transcription system is inherently partial, biased and ideological in as much as it reflects the theoretical goals of the transcribers.45 Presenting the words submitted in the Greek alphabet enables us to present British Cypriot Greek not as exotic or alien but as a legitimate variety of Cypriot Greek. We also transcribe our examples in the International Phonetic Alphabet to show the phonetic features of the words submitted and to make them accessible to readers not familiar with the Greek alphabet. We exceptionally use an acute accent to indicate stress instead of a superscripted vertical line preceding the stressed syllable.

• 46 For a discussion of the folk etymology of these terms, see Sarantakos 2017. We can see in the submi (...)

28A few Cypriot Greek words that are inaccurately but widely believed to be of English origin were also submitted, including αμπάλατος /a^mbálatos/ ‘idiot’, which is thought to be an adaptation of ‘unbalanced’, τσαέρα /tsʰːaéra/ ‘chair’, and σικκιρτισμένος /sicʰːirtizménos/ ‘exasperated’, thought to come from ‘sick and tired’.46

• 47 Warren 1999, p. 224.

29Finally, we identified four instances of semantic shift. Most examples are generalisations of meaning47 in the UK use of a pre-existing Greek word as seen in σερβίρω /servíro/ ‘to serve a customer in any setting’ in the UK but ‘to serve in a hospitality setting’ in Cyprus, and στάμπα /stá^mba/ meaning both ‘an instrument for stamping and ‘postage stamp’ in the UK and not just the former as in Cyprus.

• 48 Van Mensel 2018.

33A quarter of the words submitted were only mentioned once in our database. This is unsurprising, given the oral, ever-changing and non-standardised form of British Cypriot Greek, comprising idiolect, familylect48 and also terms used widely in the UK. At the same time, a number of lexical items were submitted multiple times. The ten most frequently submitted words are shown in table 1.

• 49 Πολισμάνος (/polismános/ rather than /poliʃmános/) is also encountered in some varieties of Greek, (...)
• 50 Silverstein 2003, p. 193.

35All top ten words are (or, could be perceived to be) morphological adaptations of English loanwords, which we further explore in the next section.49 Although there is significant variation in form in the corpus (for instance, the three occurrences of ‘business man’ are all different: πίζινες μαν /pízːines man/, πιζιναδόρος /pizːinaðóros/ and πιζινάρης /pizːináris/), in the higher-frequency words there is overwhelming convergence between the various submissions of the same term. The frequency of occurrence and stability of form of the words listed in table 1 suggest that they are understood by their speakers to be indexical50 of the variety of Cypriot Greek spoken in the UK.

• 51 Alvanoudi 2019, Tamis 1986.
• 52 Hatzidaki 1994.
• 53 Ralli, Makri 2020.
• 54 Seaman 1972, Economou 2001.
• 55 Hatoss 2016.
• 56 Rocchi 2006.
• 57 Adalar, Tagliamonte 1998.

36Our data suggest that the full integration of English words into the morphological system of Cypriot Greek was very common among early Greek Cypriot migrants who were dominant in Cypriot Greek and for the most part had a rudimentary knowledge of English. This is in line with the findings of studies on other Greek-speaking diasporas such as the ones in Australia,51 Belgium,52 Canada53 and the United States of America,54 as well as communities speaking other languages across the world, for example Hungarian speakers in Australia,55 Sicilian speakers in the UK56 and Cypriot Turkish speakers in the UK.57 Another similarity lies in the fact that the vast majority of morphologically integrated loanwords that we collected were nouns, while a number of British Cypriot Greek loanwords have parallel developments in other diasporic varieties of Greek; see table 2.

• 58 Alvanoudi 2019.
• 59 Ralli, Makri 2020.

• 60 Wolgemuth 2009.
• 61 The following abbreviations are used in the glosses of linguistic examples: 1: first person, 3: thi (...)

38In British Cypriot Greek, fully integrated loanwords fall into two categories: direct and indirect insertions.60 Direct insertions consist of an English-origin stem, whose sound shape has been adapted to the phonology of Cypriot Greek, followed by a thematic vowel and an inflectional suffix expressing gender, case and number (1).61 In indirect insertions, one or more derivational suffixes are found between the stem and the thematic vowel functioning as morphological integrators (2). Direct insertion is found with nouns, while indirect insertion occurs with some nouns (2a–d), adjectives (2e), verbs (2f–g) and verbal forms (2h).

• 62 Wells 1992.

40In other cases, the English forms were reanalysed so that their endings were mapped onto Cypriot Greek thematic vowels and inflectional suffixes. This process applied to nouns ending in /ə/, which was reanalysed as an ‑a‑ thematic vowel (3). This matching was most possibly aided by the phonological similarity between the Greek thematic vowel and the open realisation /ɐ/, which is sometimes found in London English instead of the schwa in word-final position.62 In a limited number of cases, /ʌ/ was reanalysed as ‑a‑ following the deletion of a word-final nasal as in (3c). Reanalysis is also found in nouns ending in /i/, which was reinterpreted as an ‑i‑ thematic vowel (4), and nouns ending in /ɪn/ with /ɪ/ being reanalysed as an ‑i‑ thematic vowel and /n/ as the ‑n inflectional suffix (5). In these forms, the phonemic correspondence between the English forms and the British Cypriot Greek stems is only partial: /ɡʌvnə/ → /kavn‑/, /kʊkə/ → /kʰːukʰː‑/, /tʃuːɪŋ ɡʌm/ → /tʃʰːui^ŋg‑/, /nɔːti/ → /notʰː‑/, /bʊki/ → /^mbukʰː‑/, /lɒri/ → /lor‑/, /kɪtʃʰːɪn/ → /kʰːitʃʰː‑/, /tʃɪkɪn/ → /tʃʰːik‑/.

• 63 Newton 1972.
• 64 Nevins, Chitoran 2008.

42Once integrated into the British Cypriot Greek inflectional system, loanwords participate in morphological processes, both inflectional and derivational, in the same way as native and other inherited words. Consider the past-tense form εστίμωσεν in (2g) or the participle μπουκκαρισμένη in (2h) above as well as the neuter stem allomorphy ‑μα‑ ~ ‑ματ‑ in (7a) as in the native αρώτημαν ~ αρωτήματα and the diminutive formation in (7b), which employs the most common diminutive suffix in Cypriot Greek ‑ού(ιν). Morphologically integrated loanwords are also subject to the same morphophonological rules as native lexical items.63 This can be seen in the hardening of the glide /ria/ → /rja/ → [rka] in plural forms such as the ones in (8a) as in the native ζάριν ~ ζάρκα and in the palatalisation /sia/ → /sja/ → [ʃa] 8b) as in αμάξιν ~ αμάξια.64

• 65 Gavriilidou, Mitits 2020; Ralli, Makri 2020.

43The analysis of our dataset further showed that the processes of loanword integration in British Cypriot Greek were driven by the same range of phonological, morphological and semantic factors that have been found to be at play in the integration of loanwords in other Modern Greek varieties, including the standard language.65 Nouns denoting male and female humans were assigned to masculine and feminine inflectional classes, respectively; for example, λάλλος /lálːos/ ‘landlord’ or κκουίνα /kʰːuína/ ‘Queen’. Nouns denoting nationalities were borrowed as masculine-feminine pairs such as Ιντιάνος /iⁿdiános/ ‘Indian (m)’ and Ιντιάνα /iⁿdiána/ ‘Indian (f)’. Inanimate nouns were distributed across all three genders. Nouns whose English forms ended in consonants were assigned to the ιν‑neuter inflectional class as in πίλιν /pílin/ ‘bill’ and χοτέλλιν /xotélːin/ ‘hotel’; the ον‑neuter class as in κάρον /káron/ ‘car’ or κκέτλον /cʰːétlon/ ‘kettle’; or, the ος‑masculine class as in μάππος /mápʰːos/ ‘mop’ or ρόλος /rólos/ ‘roll’. Some nouns exhibit variation between the ον‑neuter and ος‑masculine classes. This is found, for example, with κκέτλον /cʰːétlon/ ~ κκέτλος /cʰːétlos/ ‘kettle’ and μάππον /mápʰːon/ ~ μάππος /mápʰːos/ ‘mop’. Nouns ending in /ə/, which as was mentioned may be realised as /ɐ/ in London, were assigned to the α‑feminine class: μήτρα /mítra/ ‘meter’, χίττα /xítʰːa/ ‘heater’ or χούβα /xúva/ ‘hoover’. In such nouns, it was the phonological shape of the original English nouns that served as the model for the creation of the British Cypriot Greek copy and not their orthographical representation, which is the basis of Cypriot Greek loanwords such as the neuter noun (μ)πόιλερ /^mbóiler/ or /póiler/ ‘boiler’. Native morphological integrators were used in the integration of verbs (‑αρ‑ in τσιαρτζιάρω /tʃʰːardʒáro/ ‘to charge’, ‑αρ‑ and ‑ισκ‑ in μουβαρίσκω /muvarísko/ ‘to move’, ‑ωνν‑ in στιμώννω /stimónːo/ ‘to steam’), adjectives (‑ικ‑ in τσιίππικος /tʃ ʰːípʰːikos/ ‘cheap’), and some attributive feminine nouns (‑ισσ‑ in κράφτισσα /kráftisːa/ ‘crafty’, πλόντισσα /plóⁿdisːa/ ‘blonde’ or στίντζιισσα /stíⁿdʒisːa/ ‘stingy’).

• 66 Terkourafi 2005, p. 310; Tsiplakou et al. 2006.

44The Grenglish Project showed that migration to the UK did not bring a halt to the diachronic development of Cypriot Greek. The language(s) that early migrants brought with them continued to evolve post migration and be enriched by novel lexical items, both words and longer units such as phrases, that were borrowed (or, rather, copied) from English and added into the inherited lexical stock. Although not all of the lexical innovations were fully integrated into the Cypriot Greek inflectional system, many were, while all borrowings were adapted to the phonology of the language. These processes took place independently of the (socio)linguistic developments that saw the levelling of intradialectal differences in Cyprus and the rise of the pan-Cypriot koiné,66 having as a result the divergence of British Cypriot Greek from the Greek-speaking contingent of the island and its rise as a separate variety in its own right.

• 67 Thomas 1991.
• 68 Mackridge 2009, Mirambel 1964, Moschonas 2004, Moschonas 2009.
• 69 Li, García 2013.

46Andreas’s and Tom’s quotes also provide a glimpse to the reactions that the use of material that is perceived as British Cypriot Greek might trigger, especially but not exclusively among speakers of homeland varieties of Cypriot Greek. Our engagement with the public as part of our project brought to light linguistic ideologies about the perceived status of Grenglish material, that of British Cypriot Greek as a whole and even the worthiness of efforts to document and preserve it at all. We received comments assigning low value to British Cypriot Greek, often reproducing puristic67 tropes that are commonly expressed in Greek-speaking contexts and which draw legitimacy from two powerful ideological schemata: the prestige of antiquity and the primacy of written language.68 British Cypriot Greek forms and structures were constructed as deviations from these principles by virtue of their predominantly spoken use and the extent to which they mix material from (Cypriot) Greek and English, two bounded linguistic entities that are to be kept separate. Any interaction between the two, including the borrowing and integration of English linguistic material into (Cypriot) Greek and the combined use of English and (Cypriot) Greek in codeswitching or translanguaging69 was seen as contaminating the Hellenic purity of the ancestral language. Such views sometimes incorporated allusions to the socioeconomic, educational and linguistic profiles of early Greek Cypriot migrants and associations between their perceived knowledge of English (or lack thereof) and the low value or quality of their linguistic creations. These are crystallised in two tweets, as well as in an email we received on 11 June 2019 in response to our call for submitters. In a public event that we held in a local Greek Cypriot community in autumn 2019, an attendee voiced the opinion that Grenglish was “not Greek, not English, nothing” and “not part of my heritage”, that designation only rightfully belonging to elements of ancient Greek culture that either survive or are taught in the Greek Cypriot παροικία.

• 70 Ioannidou et al. 2020; Karatsareas 2018; Karatsareas 2019; Karatsareas 2020; Karatsareas 2021; Kara (...)

47The second tweet and the email further highlight the key role that Greek complementary schools play in reproducing, reinforcing and perpetuating language ideologies that hierarchise varieties of Greek with respect to notions such as correctness and properness. Standard Greek is promoted through institutional policies and everyday practices both inside and outside school classrooms as the language, the variety of education and achievement and the form of communication shared by people of Greek origin around the world. Cypriot Greek, in contrast, is portrayed as a dialect, a local and rural variety that may be an important constituent of Greek Cypriot identity that has its own distinctive cultural and symbolic value but which is inaccessible to Greek speakers outside Cyprus, thus separating speakers of Cypriot Greek from the imagined transnational community of Hellenism.70 It is telling that, in an interview undertaken as part of a separate research project on language ideologies in Greek complementary schools in London, a Greek Cypriot teacher mentioned that she allowed her pupils to use ‘mainstream’ Cypriot Greek features in their speech but that she would correct British Cypriot Greek words, openly questioning their status as legitimate forms of language that are in use among the pupils and the wider community. British Cypriot Greek is therefore positioned at the bottom of the hierarchy of Greek varieties, below Cypriot Greek, which is in turn positioned below Standard Greek at the top.

• 71 Agha 2005, p. 45.

50However, the contributions to the platform were much more varied than we expected, incorporating a wide range of phonological adaptations, Standard Greek and Cypriot Greek words, as well as puns and wordplay and even adaptations of Cypriot Greek words to English morphology. The last category is indicative of second, third and fourth generations’ agentive performance of British Greek Cypriotness. We have taken an inclusive view of what constitutes Grenglish, even if a few of the submitters objected to the inclusion of what they described as ‘actual Greek’ or ‘Cypriot’. Our inclusive approach to Grenglish was motivated by the fact that lists of words submitted almost invariably included a combination of UK‑specific loanwords as well as words widely used in Cyprus. This suggests that a characteristic of British Cypriot Greek is the fuzziness of boundaries between UK‑specific phonological and morphological adaptations, Cypriot Greek and even Standard Greek, and the limited ability of many speakers to clearly delineate between the different varieties and between widely-used lexical stock and familylects. Instead, especially as far as younger generations of British-born Greek Cypriots are concerned, linguistic varieties ranging from phonological and morphological adaptations of English (and Greek) loanwords, to humorous word coinage, to all registers of Cypriot Greek seem to have been enregistered71 as ‘Grenglish’.

• 72 Sinclair, Cunningham 2000, p. 15.

51Despite some purist attitudes within the community that supress Grenglish and categorise it as a wrong or ‘nothing’ variety and despite its ephemerality, hybridity and heterogeneity, Grenglish has sustained a life and a course of its own. The submissions to the online platform of the project suggest that this new, diasporic variety incorporates a wealth of elements that embody the life trajectories, lived experiences and the multilingual creative practices of its speakers: older forms of Cypriot Greek, morphologically (un)integrated loanwords, phonological adaptations of English placenames, words denoting facets of the everyday life of migrants in a new and different geographical and social context. British Cypriot Greek therefore exemplifies “the productive construction of new hybrid identities and cultures through the active, simultaneous processes of maintenance and negotiation between the poles of an original home and a newly acquired host culture”.72