Page 274 - Beholding Liberty!

5. The term «linguistic imprint»
par excellence refers to the idiolect, i.e. the particular style that characterizes every speaker
(cf. Leech & Short 1981: 167). Here it is used in semantic extension, to define the particular style of a collectivity during
a specific period.
6. See relatedly, Kazazis 1999; Sarantakos 2020.
7. «...the persistent quest for
a unified form of language already constitutes one of the main features of social worry,
but also of intellectual activity» (Stavridi-Patrikiou 1999: 10).
8. See, Simopoulos 1998; Μackridge 2014.
9. See, http://www.greek-language. gr/digitalResources/ancient_greek/ history/ag_history/browse.html? start=100.
10. For the κοινή/common see, Siegel 1985: 363.
11. See, Horrocks 2006: 546-547.
274 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!
into a different linguistic form, the written archaistic, a fact that presupposes, to a great extent, interpretive work and linguistic choices. Without possessing sufficient factual evidence to elucidate this transformational process, we still have to bear it in mind when approaching the sources of the period.
In this setting, this paper explores the linguistic imprint5 of the National Regeneration, before, during and immediately after the Revolution of 1821: first, the wider context is outlined, including, on the one hand, the pre-revolutionary linguistic situation, and, on the other hand, the metalinguistic views of the Greek Enlight- eners; to continue, we will focus our attention on the case of the Archives of the Greek Regeneration (from now on: AGR), an emblematic archival collection of the Library of the Hellenic Parliament, which served as the main source of documentary material for the Exhibition «Beholding Liberty! At the Hellenic Parliament, two centuries later», in order to make remarks on aspects of the Fighers’ written and spoken language. Finally, we will conclude with some observations on the course of the Greek language in the newly-founded state after 1830. This is a relatively under-investigated period from a linguistic point of view,6 despite the fact that language constituted the key instrument of the uprising, but also the central matter at stake regarding the shaping of the Modern Greek state identity after Independence,7 as attested in the famous «language issue».
THE LINGUISTIC SITUATION IN PRE-REVOLUTIONARY GREECE
The Ottoman Empire, within the borders of which the enslaved Greeks also lived, was de facto multilingual8: apart from the dominant Turkish and Greek, other spoken languages included Persian, Arabic, Armenian, Ser- bian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Rumanian, Jewish etc..9 In any case, the essential differentiating element was not language, but religion: those Christians who spoke Greek, irrespective of whether it was their mother tongue or not, could be considered as Romioi (Rum), which results in the term also encompassing nationalities such as the Vlachs, the Albanians and the Bulgarians.
Certainly, in this multilingual landscape, the Greek language held a prominent position, especially in institu- tional domains, as, on the one hand, the language of administration and diplomacy, in the form of an «aver- age» register, a compromise between the written koine and the spoken norm, and, on the other hand, as the language of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the policy of which contributed decisively to the preservation of the Greek linguisitc and religious identity of the enslaved. As Horrocks (2006: 534) points out, the standard written language that was prevalent in the education guided by the ecclesiastical circles, not only did sup- port a scholarly oral norm, but also secured the coherence of the Greek language and prevented its greater segmentation into local vernaculars.
As opposed to the written language, in the everyday spoken one there was not even within the Greek-speak-
ing territory a common,10 standard variety, namely characterized by a high degree of standardization and
constitutes a unified instrument of communication between citizens – an expected absence since there were
no citizens, but subjects. Spoken Greek of the early 19th century, a product of natural diachronic linguistic
evolution, encloses a mosaic of dialects: Peloponnesian-Ionian islands, Tsakonian, old Athenian, southeastern
(Chios, the Dodecanese, Cyprus), Cretan-Cycladic, dialects of the North (continental area north of Attica and
north Aegean), Pontic, Cappadocian (in central Asia Minor), South Italian (in isolated villages of Apulia and
Calabria) – geographical varieties mutually intelligible, of course, but with differences on a grammatical-syn-
tactical level and in vocabulary, sometimes important ones, especially between dialects spoken in geograph-
ical regions lying far apart.
11
In any case, these demotic varieties, with their diverse local and supra-local stratifications, were not cut off from scholarly/learned written varieties, as already in Byzantine times a spoken koine had been formed in the big centres of the Empire (first among them being Constantinople) and in the Greek communities abroad, with influences from the dialects of the region but also from the learned language; the latter was widely used