Mytilene's Airport: Investigating New English in the Greek Public
Welcome to Mytilene’s Airport: Investigating New English in the Greek Public Transport Context* Costas Canakis ABSTRACT The focus of this paper is on a New English, Greek English, as manifested through public transport announcements and notices. Despite the historical non-existence of a Greek English (as opposed to a well-attested American Greek “Greek-American” [cf. Seaman (1974), Canakis (1992)], there is a sizeable sector of the Greek working force which uses English as a working language. Most salient among this is the subgroup occupied in the travel industry. It is their lan- guage which is at issue here. Moreover, to delimit the scope of this brief study, I have not dealt with their conversational English, but with a highly demarcated, mostly formulaic, and official linguistic manifestation: announcements. The thesis of this paper is that there are discernible linguistic characteristics that allow us to speak of a Greek English, at least in the travel industry (which, incidentally, is supposed to be our national strength as vacation purveyors to inhabitants of less temperate climates). My set of work- ing hypotheses has been that: i) constructions particular to Standard English will be the first to go and shall be replaced with analogous native ones, ii) this shall be manifested not only in conver- sations, but even in announcements, short and clearly bounded though they may be, and iii) be- cause of their official status, public announcements will constitute the measure against which oth- er (conversational) usage(s) will be gauged by Greek speakers of English (cf. example 7). All these hypotheses seem to be confirmed by the relevant data I have been collecting.
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