Written Cypriot Greek in online chat: Usage and attitudes

Themistocleous, C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0657-1376 (2009) Written Cypriot Greek in online chat: Usage and attitudes. In: 8th International Conference on Greek Linguistics, 30 August - 2 September 2007, Ioannina, Greece, pp. 473-488.

Abstract/Summary

This paper investigates the attitudes of Greek-Cypriot internet users towards written Cypriot Greek (CG) in online chat. CG does not have a standard official orthography and it is only used in informal oral communication. With the emergence of computer-mediated communication (CMC), a novel Romanized form of CG is used instead of Standard Greek (SG) in online environments (Themistocleous 2005). To investigate language attitudes, an online questionnaire was distributed electronically to Greek-Cypriot internet users. The results show that the majority of the informants have positive attitudes towards written CG, a practice that goes against the results of previous attitudinal surveys. In this paper, I demonstrate how the internet can influence and change the attitudes of Greek-Cypriots towards their regional variety. It is argued that the unconventional and norm-free character of CMC allows internet users to use their non-standard variety in a domain where the standard would be expected to be used.

Item Type	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/45865
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Language and Applied Linguistics
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item