Greeklish

Greeklish, a portmanteau of the words Greek and English, also known as Grenglish or Latinoellinika/Λατινοελληνικά or Frankolevantika/Φραγκολεβάντικα or ASCII Greek, is Greek language written with the Latin alphabet. It is an example of transliteration.

Introduction

Greeklish is commonly used on the Internet when Greek people communicate by email, IRC or Instant Messaging. Sometimes it is also used in SMS and in written or oral communication established between native Greek speakers living in the UK. This began as a trend but is now actually used as a slang language.

History

In the past it was difficult to make computers recognize Greek characters, because not all operating systems or applications had support for Greek. Today, modern software supports many more languages (including Greek), and it is much easier for Greeks to communicate in their mother tongue, Modern Greek, over the Internet. However, people still use Greeklish, because it is faster to type and one does not have to worry about orthography. (This does not mean it is not impossible for a spelling flame war to erupt in a Greeklish forum: users treating Greeklish as a close transliteration rather than a phonetic transcription will object to users who do not. Such a flame war, with much meta-discussion, took place on ^* in August 1997, occasioned by the spelling of the river Evros/Έβρος as Eyros, implying the Greek misspelling Εύρος.)

It is reported by some people that the first modern usage of Greeklish appeared in EMY (Ethniki Meteorologiki Ypiresia), the national meteorological service of Greece, several decades ago and certainly predating the Internet.

The term frankolevantinika properly refers to the use of the Latin script to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism. ("Frankos" is the Greek and Levantine term for Western European, and by extension Roman Catholic.) This usage was part of the broader tendency in the region for script to follow creed (e.g. Greek script for Turkish Orthodox Christians -- "karamanlidika", and the use of Greek and Arabic script in Albania), and was routine in the Venetian-ruled Aegean in the Early Modern era. Indeed, the autograph manuscripts of several Greek literary works of the Renaissance are in Latin script (e.g. the comedy Fortounatos by Markos Antonios Foskolos, 1655). This convention was also known as frankohiotika/φραγκοχιώτικα, "Catholic Chiot", alluding to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios. Hearkening back to this established term, a common (but derogatory) term for Greeklish is frankovlahika/φραγκοβλάχικα -- "hillbilly Western" (exploiting the negative cultural stereotype among ethnic Greeks of the Vlachs).

Orthographic and phonetic Greeklish

Greeklish may be orthographic or phonetic.

Lack of standard

There are many ways to write Greeklish. As there is no commonly accepted method of transcribing Greek characters into Latin ones between the Greek Internet users, everyone uses their own way.

ELOT, The Greece's Standards Organization, have proposed a standard transliteration, used by the British Council, but not by the general public. But only this ASCII Greek respects the original Greek orthography and allows an automatic, fully reversible transliteration.

Books written in Greeklish

Giannis Androutsopoulos (see References) talks about "Exegesis", a book in Greeklish that was published by Oxy Publications in 2000. The Greeklish transliteration was based on the Greek translation of the original book written by Astro Teller. A novel about Artificial Intelligence, it describes a computer program that has acquired a "mind" of its own. The original book was written entirely in the form of e-mail messages, something that prompted Mr. Androutsopoulos and his collaborators to publish a version of it in Greeklish.

Web sites written in Greeklish

Most personal or informal web sites were written in Greeklish in the past. Today this is not the case, as the use of Greeklish on a web site is considered inappropriate. However there are still many Greek web sites which utilize Greeklish.

Greek companies which use Greeklish

Some Internet Service Providers in Greece use both Greek and Greeklish in their emails. For example, the corporate announcements sent to users via email are usually written in English, Greek, and Greeklish.

Use in business communication

Use of Greeklish for business purposes or business communication is considered as a lack of business ability or respect, by some.

Current trends

Around 2004 a hostile movement against Greeklish appeared in many Greek online Web discussion boards (fora) where Greeklish was the primary "language" of communication. Administrators threatened to ban users who continued to use Greeklish, thus making the use of Greek mandatory, but using Greeklish failed to become a serious reason to get banned. Examples include the Translatum Greek Translation Forum, the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network Forum, the Venus Project Forum, the adslgr.com Forum and the Greek Technological Forum. The reason for this is the fact that text written in Greeklish is considerably less aesthetically pleasing, and also much harder to read, compared to text written in the Greek alphabet. A non-Greek speaker/reader can guess this by this example: δις ιζ χαρντ του ριντ would be the way to write "this is hard to read" in English but utilizing the Greek alphabet!

A counter argument used by forum users is that a lot of users live abroad, and write from computers they don't own (university or internet cafes). There, they don't have the ability to write in Greek, so Greeklish is the only option.

On Greek IRC and IM, most of the time only Greeklish is used.

It is considered by some that Greeklish is dangerous for the cultural integrity of the Greek language. However, others disagree and support Greeklish.

Notwithstanding the loaded politics of Greeklish, jocular use of English, transcribed into Greek and then transliterated into Greeklish, shows how users can manipulate the use of script to ironic effect: if a user, in the middle of a Greeklish conversation, types "dis iz xarnt tou rint" for "this is hard to read" (transliterated via δις ιζ χαρντ του ριντ), they are ironically distancing themselves from their code-switching to English, doubly ironic since the script is Roman but the orthography effectively Greek. (One might retort that this is aesthetically displeasing—but of course that is the point.) This artifice is particularly widespread on the Hellas mailing list.

Wide use for Greeklish in long texts is nowadays (2006) unusual. It is still used, however, among friends as an informal, alternative means of communication for short messages.

Another current trend in Greeklish is the introduction of Leet phrasing and vocabulary. Many Leet words or slang have been internalized within the Greek spoken language through Greek gamers online in games such as World of Warcraft.

Examples:

Greeklish	Explanation
Noobas, Noobidi, NoobAs	"Noob" with a Greek masculine suffix (-as) and neutral (-idi)
Ownaro, OwnAro	Meaning "I own"; used as a verb. Actually English verb + aro is a frequent coinage forming many words
Gkosas	Stemming from the word Gosa, meaning experienced player
Tsagia	"Good bye", being a word meaning teas, but jokingly used as ciao in supposedly plural
Re c	Pronounced "re sy" meaning roughly "mate, dude"
Kalimerez, Merez	Kalimeres, meaning (Good) Mornings; note that the final z is inspired from byez
Tpt	Tipota, meaning "nothing"
Dn	Den, meaning "not"
OMG, OhMiGi	Mispronunciation of OMG (OhEmg); "Oh My God"

Examples

Καλημέρα, πώς είστε; (good morning, how are you?)

Greeklish 1: kalimera, pos iste; (phonetic)
Greeklish 2: kalhmera, pws eiste; (reconciling with spelling rules)
Typing as if the keyboard layout were set to Greek, when it is actually set to US English: Kalhm;era, p;vw e;isteq

Θήτα (theta)

Greeklish 1: thita
Greeklish 2: 8hta
Greeklish 3: uita
Typing as if the keyboard layout were set to Greek, when it is actually set to US English: U;hta

As you can see, it is very common to use the number 8 for the letter Θ/θ (theta), or the letter u (probably because u and theta are on the same key on the Greek computer keyboards) or the combination th. For the letter Ε/ε (epsilon) usually Greeks use the English letter e. But most commonly 3 is used for the letter Ξ/ξ (ksi) (because of the visual resemblance). For the letter Ψ/ψ (psi) the number 4 is used, or the combination of the letters p and s together (ps).

References

Jannis Androutsopoulos (Γιάννης Ανδρουτσόπουλος), a linguist at the University of Hanover, conducted extensive research on the history and sociolinguistics of Greeklish in 1998-2001; his publications, as well as publications in the media about the phenomenon, are available on a dedicated site.

Greeklish-to-Greek conversion

Since the appearance of Greeklish there have been numerous attempts to develop applications for automatic conversion from Greeklish to Greek. Most of them can cope with only some of Greeklish transliteration patterns and can be found and downloaded in the Internet. The first complete system for automatic transcription of Greeklish into Greek, obtaining correct spelling is All Greek to Me! , developed and provided by Institute for Language and Speech Processing

External links

Romanization | Hellenic scripts | Internet slang | Portmanteaus

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