Dr Angeliki Alvanoudi, lecturer at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, will present an online only seminar about the Greeks of Cairns, on Thursday 7 July, at 7 pm, as part of the Greek History and Culture Seminars, offered by the Greek Community of Melbourne.

The seminar examines the structure and use of the Greek language spoken by immigrants in Cairns, Far North Queensland, Australia. In the first part of the talk, Dr Alvanoudi will analyse language contact-induced changes, such as lexical borrowings from English into Greek, which are motivated by intense contact with the English-speaking host community, and cultural pressure associated with the prestige of the dominant language. In the second part of the talk, she will focus on the functions of code-switching in Australian Greek talk-in-interaction. Dr Alvanoudi will show that Greek immigrants switch languages to pursue the recipient’s response, accomplish actions that invoke asymmetry between speaker and hearer, report direct speech, make positive assessments or display various aspects of their identities. The data analysed derive from participant observation and some 23 hours of audio and video-recorded conversations with first- and second-generation Greek immigrants that were collected during fieldwork in 2013.

Dr Angeliki Alvanoudi is a sociolinguist specialising in language and gender, language contact, and language in interaction. She is currently lecturing at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and she is a Research Associate at the Institute of Modern Greek Studies. In April 2013, she graduated with a PhD from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In May 2013, she took up a two year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Language and Culture Research Centre, James Cook University, to examine the Greek variety spoken by immigrant communities in Far North Queensland, Australia. She has written the books Grammatical gender in interaction: Cultural and cognitive aspects published with Brill in 2015, and Modern Greek in diaspora: An Australian perspective published with Palgrave Pivot in 2019. She has published articles in various journals including Gender and Language, Pragmatics, Text & Talk, the Journal of Greek Linguistics, and the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages.

When: Thursday 7 July 2022, at 7 pm
Online only seminar via Facebook and Youtube