Page 281 - Beholding Liberty!

THE LANGUAGE OF THE MODERN GREEK STATE
In 1830 the problem that had already appeared in the early 19th century had now become a pressing matter: which will be the official language of the newly-founded state, the language of law, administra- tion and education? Imperative was by then the need of linguistic programming, which wouldl establish a common language.
Of course, the pre-revolutionary mosaic of dialects in the oral speech, that we earlier commented upon, has not ceased to exist. Let us remember the theatrical play of D. Byzantios Βαβυλωνία/Babylo- nia (1836), where he describes in a humorous manner, albeit with literary excess, the amusing misun- derstandings that occur among the protagonists, due to the lack of a common linguistic instrument of communication.
Despite the existence of geogaphical variation, a standard spoken common language gradually takes shape in the oral speech, having as its essential demotic component the Peloponnesian-Ionian Islands idiom. The confinement of dialectic elements to isolated pockets of the Peloponnese (Tsakonia, Mani) gave the opportunity to the said idiom to appear as more «ready» to form the oral common language of the Modern Greek state, rising as a kind of «crucible», within which the idiomatic differences of the indigenous and the expatriates are gradually moulded together: because of the pre-revolutionary influ- ences of the scholarly tradition and the common cultivated speech of the central region, that we point- ed out earlier, on this standard spoken language, it was relatively easy to also incorporate the learned varieties of the Greeks of the Diaspora, who arrived after the Revolution.33
In the years that follow the foundation of the independent Greek state, the issue of «establishing the spoken language had been completely pushed aside from the foreground» (Stavridi-Patrikiou 1999: 11), as in public life other priorities prevailed, which had to do with organizing from scratch the principal structures of a modern urban state –it relates to that which M. Triantafyllides ( [1938] 1993) called «the unsolved problem and the silent beginning» in his «Ιστορική Εισαγωγή/Historical Introduction».
In parallel, in the wider atmosphere of neoclassicism that predominated in the Bavarian period, a first attempt at a language policy was the educational law of 1834, which determined that the language of instruction and of handbooks will be the ancient Greek, not the archaistic, and certainly not the demotic. Noteworthy is that this turn towards the ancient Greek past is dominant as much in language as it is in art, two different semiotic codices, which though follow parallel routes, dictated by the spirit of the time. For this reason, Politis (2009: 85-86) refers to an «archaistic city» and «archaistic language», upon the proclamation of Athens as capital in 1834: «Neoclassicism prevailed sweepingly, and just like every- one added an ancient-like ending to the words to make them archaistic, and was calling the παιδί/child as παιδίον and the βασιλιά/king as βασιλέa, so everyone installed plaster columns at the corners of the houses or small, cheap antefixes on their roofs. In the same way, they called themselves with ancient names and ancient surnames, ending in –ίδης and –άδης, or they named their stores with ancient-like inscriptions οπωροπωλείον/green grocer’s, αρτοποιείον/baker’s and the like».
The Korais-inspired views about the definition of the language dominate to such an extent that the kath- arevousa prevails, empirically and without plan, but all the same de facto, in the written language, mainly thanks to its use by the local intellectual and social elit. As Horrocks (2006: 43) comments, «[...] the mod- ern standard language is shaped under the strong influences of scholarly tradition, not only adopting elements of conjugation and morphology in general, but also absorbing an extensive vocabulary, which was unknown in the 17th century». The «high» variety is enriched with administrative, military and legal terminology, mainly of archaistic inspiration: i.e. κυβέρνησις/government instead of γκουβέρνο (Ital. gov- erno), κράτος/state instead of ντοβλέτι (Turk. devlet) etc. – a trend that has already been discussed. And similarly, in the general vocabulary a massive formation of coinages along learned prototypes is attest-
33. See, Kehagioglou 1999b: 246. For a different approach
cf. Pantelidis 2007.
The linguistic imprint of the National Regeneration 281