Each time Marilena returns to Crete, it only takes a few moments for her to return to the dialect of her native island. But the 44-year-old Cretan knows that her children will probably never learn this oral tradition that dates back several centuries.
“I lived in Crete until I was 18 years old, while they were growing up in Athens. They will not have the opportunity to learn like us, ”he says sadly. The new card game Dopiolalia (“dialect” in Greek) could rekindle interest in Greek dialects, both active and extinct, which linguists say are disappearing. “Languages are disappearing … our goal was to save them,” says the game’s creator, Panagiotis Panagiotopoulos.
Thousands of Greeks – the exact number is unknown – can speak or understand a local dialect in many parts of the country, especially on islands or in remote areas. With origins dating back to the Iron Age, dialects have been influenced by the languages of colonizing populations, such as the Franks, Slavs, Turks, and Venetians. However, the researchers note that traces of ancient Greek still exist. For example, the Cretan word for snail (“hohlios”) comes from the ancient Greek “cochlias”, points out Christoforos Charalambakis, professor of linguistics at the National University of Athens. “Ovon” is similar to the ancient Greek word “oon”, which means egg in Pontic, the language of the Pontic Greeks of the shores of the Black Sea, whose origins date back to the 8th century BC.
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Another dialect with ancient roots is Tsakonio, in the southern Peloponnese. Researchers believe it originates from Laconian, the language of the warriors of Sparta.
The “magic” of oral tradition
“This is the magic of the Greek language: a 4,000-year-old oral tradition,” says Charalambakis. In a 2019 report, the European Union’s education portal Eurydice estimated that between 40 and 50 million people speak a total of 60 regional languages in the Union. But in Greece, those who speak these dialects have to fight ridicule and “huge cultural racism” in the cities, says Panagiotopoulos.
National cohesion is a sensitive issue in a country that became independent in 1830 and only took its current form after World War II.
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“There has never been an official census on the number of speakers of these dialects in Greece, but they have dropped considerably in the last 50 years,” says Angela Ralli, emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Patras. The Academy of Athens, the main research institution in Greece, has an archive with more than 1,500 documents on dialects, as well as oral records. But most of the glossaries are the work of amateur researchers, and the teaching is carried out mainly by private cultural associations.
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Introduced last month, the Dopiolalia game encompasses Cretan, Pontic Greek, Epirus, and 19th-century Athenian street slang, Koutsavakika, in different card packs. Future versions will include sailor lyrics, Aegean island dialects and Kaliarda, a coded dialect invented by gay Greeks in the 1940s. The response has been enthusiastic, says Panagiotopoulos. “We did not expect such a quick positive response. People ask us: “Where have you been all this time?”
