Outline

Greek Heritage Language Corpus

Greek Heritage Language Corpus (GHLC)

The Greek Heritage Language Corpus (GHLC) was developed as part of the research program "Varieties of Greek as a Heritage Language: Creation of a Corpus and Comparative Study" (Project Code: OPS (MIS) 5006199), under the scientific supervision of Zoi Gavriilidou, Professor at the Department of Greek Philology, Democritus University of Thrace. Due to the lack of similar linguistic resources, the GHLC was created to collect, for the first time, linguistic data that contribute to the study of Greek as a heritage language, as spoken in three geographically distant Greek communities: The Greek community of Chicago, USA The Greek community of St. Petersburg, Russia The Greek community of Moscow, Russia The GHLC data contribute to theoretical discussions on heritage languages and have practical applications for the future development of appropriate curricula, syllabi, and effective teaching methods for Greek as a heritage language. This effort aims to preserve and enhance Greek language knowledge and usage, which is gradually diminishing under the influence of majority languages. GHLC Contents:

 

The GHLC consists of:

  1. Audio recordings of narratives and discussions with speakers of Greek as a heritage language residing in Chicago, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. Specifically, the corpus includes approximately 90 hours of transcribed audio material (30 hours from each location).

  2. Transcriptions of the audio files, enriched with basic metadata, marking overlaps, pauses, intonation, pitch variations, and other speech characteristics (see the transcription symbol chart). The total transcribed material exceeds 130,000 words (85,000 words from Chicago, 25,000 from St. Petersburg, and 20,000 from Moscow). Metadata from background questionnaires, available in SPSS format.

 

Access to the transcriptions with basic metadata is available upon request.

For more information on accessing GHLC materials, see: Πρόσβαση στο GHLC

References

Gavriilidou, Z & L. Mitits (2019), Profiling Greek Heritage Language Speakers in U.S.A. and Russia, European Journal of Language Studies, 6(1), 28-42. 15. Gavriilidou, Z. & Mitits, L. (2021), The Socio-linguistic Profiles, Identities, and Educational Needs of Greek Heritage Language Speakers in Chicago, Journal of Language and Education 7(1), 80-97.

https://doi.org/10.17323/jle.2021.11959.doi.org
 

Gavriilidou, Z.. Mitits, L., Mavrommatidou, S. Chatjipapa, E., Dourou, Ch. (2019). The compilation of Greek heritage language corpus (GHLC): a language resource for spoken Greek by Greek communities in the U.S. and Russia. European Journal of Language Studies, 6 (1), 61-74.

http://www.idpublications.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Full-Paper-PROFILING-GREEK-HERITAGE-LANGUAGE-SPEAKERS-IN-THE-USA-AND-RUSSIA.pdf

Πρόσβαση στο GHLC

Greek Heritage Language Corpus

 

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GHLV (form b)

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13. What language did you use most at the following periods in your life?

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16. What types of Greek-language and English-language print did you have in your home when you were growing up? (Check as many as apply)

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23. Please rate your Greek and English language abilities:

None = 1, low = 2, intermediate = 3, advanced = 4, native-like = 5

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24. When reading in Greek, how easy or difficult do you find the following genres (texts)? Use the scale 1-5 (1= next to impossible to understand; 5= very easy to understand)

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25. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being impossible and 5 being extremely easy, rate how difficult you find it to accomplish each of the following tasks in Greek and in English.

a. Greek

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26. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being impossible and 5 being extremely easy, rate how difficult you find it to accomplish each of the following tasks in Greek.

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27. In general, what do you prefer to speak?

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Mini-dictionary of loanblends used by GHSs

Greek Heritage Language Corpus

Information

The detailed lexicological analysis of loanblends held in Gavriilidou & Mitits 2020 provided data for the compilation of a mini-dictionary for loanblends. The mini-dictionary of loanblends used by GHSs is a multilingual online dictionary, addressed both to:
  1. the Greek-speaking community, whether it be heritage speakers around the world or native speakers, and
  2. the academia who wishes to study loanblends used by GHS as innovations in the vocabulary of heritage speakers.

 It complements the Greek Heritage Language Corpus (GHLC). The metalanguage of the dictionary is Greek. For the moment, the dictionary macrostructure includes data from bilingual English-Greek heritage speakers extracted from the Chicago-sub corpus of GHLC, but this initial wordlist will be complemented with the inclusion of more data: a) extracted from Russian-Greek heritage speakers’ oral productions included in the Russian sub-corpus of GHLC, or b) from manually collecting all examples presented in previous research investigating such formations.

The components included in each entry are the following:

  1. Headword, in the form of nominative singular, in the case of nouns, and in 1st person singular in the present tense of indicative mode, in the case of verbs.
  2. Pronunciation, both in I.P.A. transcription and as a wag file to facilitate access to blind people.
  3. Grammatical information, and more specifically the grammatical category (noun or verb), the gender (masculine, feminine and neuter), the inflectional paradigm in which the lemma is classified according to Inflectional Category codes used in the Dictionary of Standard Modern Greek and gender assignment procedure (analogical gender, phonological gender, suffixal analogy, combination).
  4. Etymological information: the etymological component includes information about the construction procedure of each loanblend.
  5. Meaning: Each entry provides the equivalent word in the recipient language (in our case Greek) and the loanblend translation in the donor language (English, German, Russian, etc.)
The interface is user-friendly, and the entries are presented in alphabetical order, with the added option to sort them according to different criteria. The search function offers the possibility to search by any of the components. The functionality of the mini dictionary of loanblends will be further developed so as to link each entry with the exact point in GHLC where the loanblend-lemma is found. Other future plans include the enrichment of the mini-dictionary macrostructure with loanblends used by heritage speakers of other languages, in order to transform it into a useful, for heritage languages research, database with cross-linguistic data.

Subcategories

GHLC - Saint Petersburg

Transcription Samples

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