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CULTURAL ALIENATION
"CYPRIOTS DEFEND THEIR DIALECT LIKE AJAXES"
by A.P.
The oppression of the Cypriot language/dialect or the process of nativization of the Cypriots
The nativization of the Cypriots
To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization…
Every colonized people–in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality–finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.
Frantz Fanon, Black skins, white masks
“Cypriots defend their dialect like Ajaxes” said with obvious frustration from Cypriot state television (and he was talking to Cypriots of course) a sympathetic Helleno-centric linguist who wasted years trying to Hellenise Cypriot toponyms. For reasons that remain unfathomable (unless Neo-Cypriots also reached Anafotia and Latsia), the Cypriots damaged the signs that instead of Anafotia read Anafotida and instead of Latsia, Lakka (in Greek, that is). This underground resistance of the Cypriots to the “Koine Modern Greek” deserves to be interpreted, especially at a time when the language issue is coming back.
The language issue comes up regularly in Cyprus. Until the 1950s the main dimension of this controversy took the form of the demotion of the Cypriot dialect to the level of the “jungle” - of primary material. On the one hand, the Cypriot dialect was presented as genuine ancient Greek because of the survival of words and expressions from Homer's time. On the other hand, however, the educational system and the majority of intellectuals stressed that Cypriots had to learn to speak the Athenian version of the Greek language. The Cypriot dialect was proof that Cypriots were Greeks - now they could forget it and learn to speak the 'correct' modern Greek common tongue. In other words, the Cypriot dialect was the language of the uneducated natives whom the modern Greek nation had to civilize, to make human.
Thus a relationship of power was created between the official Athenian dialect/language and the Cypriot dialect. The Cypriots, as the folk tradition of the piitarides [folk poets] and tsiattista [oral poems] testifies, had no problem in expressing themselves. Not only could they express themselves but, as has been observed, the very structure of the dialect had a musicality that made Cypriots develop a rich tradition of folk poetic speech (both written and spoken). The Cypriot dialect in this sense is the living memory of the history of Cyprus. The wealth of foreign words (Arabic, Latin, Greek, Turkish, English) that it possesses is the historical memory of the cultures that have passed through Cyprus. In this language, which the Cypriots developed on their own, they were able to express themselves and create.
Koine Modern Greek, on the contrary, was created by the intellectuals of Athens as a mechanism for homogenizing the population of the Greek state created after 1821. The aim of this language was ideological and political. It was consciously intended to eliminate the Arvanitic, Aromanian (Vlach) dialects spoken by the Greeks of mainland Greece and to condemn to decline the Greek dialects of the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean (Corfu, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, etc.) and other parts of the region.
“In order to establish Modern Greek as the superior language, all other dialects and local cultures had to be transformed into raw material… historical memory had to disappear”.
The official language of Athens (despite the conflicts between katharevousa and demotic) had behind it the state apparatus of Athens and the prestige of the “imaginary community” of the Greek nation. So to speak the Koine Modern Greek meant to be legitimate to the dictates of the national centre but also the promise that you would be “Greek”. A superior human, that is.
In order to establish Modern Greek as the superior language, all dialects and local cultures had to be transformed into “raw materials”, into raw material, which the intellectuals of Athens would use to create the mythology of the Greek nation. In other words, the memory of the local populations had to disappear. They now had to see themselves as poor relatives / as the periphery of the national centre. The fact that e.g. Kolokotronis spoke Vlach, that Botsaris did not know any Greek dialect, that the Souliotes, the people of Hydra and Spetses spoke Arvanitic, that many Greek Macedonian gladiators spoke the Slavic dialect of Macedonia, was completely erased from historical memory. The fact that in Cyprus other cultures besides the supposed Greek one flourished had to be forgotten.
The local populations were thus culturally transformed into “colonized” natives. Just as the European Colonialists recognized that Africans and Asians were human, but not complete, and thus had to be civilized - in the same manner the national center recognized Greeks from Moldavia to Cappadocia. But these “potential Greeks” had to be educated, to forget what they knew, to learn the new language, the new education. Only then would they become complete people, that is, Greeks.
National Colonialism and the Authority of Language
The process of alienating people from their immediate experience, the destruction of local creation was analogous to that of Colonialism as described by Fanon, Malcolm X and other anti-colonial revolutionaries. With one essential difference. This is a relatively unrecognized phenomenon - National Colonialism. The imposition of the culture of the state (the capital) on the province. Since the 1960s, the awareness of this phenomenon led to various decentralization-devolution movements that sometimes resulted in the registration of local dialects (Occitania-France) and the recognition of bilingualism in dialect-formal language relations (USA).
The long-term effects of this power relation between the official language of the state and the dialect were to entrench power relations in society itself. The teacher, the priest, the civil servant, the politician, the journalist, the intellectual is separated from the mass of uneducated “ peasants” by the use of the language of the national centre. You rose in the social hierarchy to the extent that you spoke “good Greek”.
The equation until 74 was: The use of “Koine Modern Greek” meant you were educated, upper class, a human of authority. The use of the Cypriot dialect, on the contrary, meant vulgarity, underdevelopment, backwardness.
Thousands of years of history were and are being levelled in the classrooms by banning the Cypriot dialect. And of course the majority was condemned to silence. In the 1950s, Nikos Kranidiotis in a commentary in Kypriaka Grammata [Cyprian Letters] observed this awkward silence of the students, the fact that they still remained natives.
The Cypriot dialect has the tendency that the Helleno-centrics dislike so much - the tendency to mix.