Welcome to the Grenglish Project

Anna Charalambidou

The Grenglish Project brings together my academic interest in Cypriot Greek (and ageing) and my own personal experiences in London’s Cypriot community.

I was born and raised in Cyprus, came to London to study in 2005 and stayed (on and off) ever since. In London, I found myself immersed in its diverse Cypriot community. I taught at Greek supplementary schools (one of my proudest achievements is that all my students at the Hellenic School of High Barnet got A and A* in their Greek GCSE exams!). I made lots of British Cypriot friends and even married one.

I am a linguist (and a senior lecturer at Middlesex University in London), and am really fascinated by how people talk, especially by what their language tells us about their age, where they come from, and how they want to present themselves. You can view my academic profile here.

I started my research career by recording my grandmother’s afternoon chats over coffee with her neighbours and friends, in a suburb of Nicosia. I was intrigued to see how older women in Cyprus strategically use various types of Cypriot Greek, Standard Greek and even English to communicate different meanings in their everyday conversations.

In a way, the Grenglish Project is also about the language of older adults, as it will document the distinct language of the first generation of Greek Cypriots who migrated to the UK. But it is more than that; I am really keen to find out how younger British-born Greek Cypriots use these words today. I hope you will all join us in this journey of discovering, rediscovering and documenting Grenglish for generations to come.

Petros Karatsareas

I was born in Athens to a family with a history of migration and multilingualism. My parents were born in Beloiannisz, a Greek village in Hungary that was founded by refugees who fled Greece after the Greek Civil War. They relocated to Greece at the beginning of the 1980s, and I naturally grew up in a household where both Greek and Hungarian were spoken.

As a child and young adult, I was fascinated by linguistic diversity. I found it so interesting to read and find out more about the different forms Greek takes in different regions and I felt somewhat disappointed that I was growing up in Athens speaking only the Athenian form. I wanted to speak a dialect, too!

I studied Greek language and literature at the University of Athens and then moved to the UK to specialise in Greek dialectology. I initially worked on the history of Greek in Asia Minor (Cappadocia and Pontus) and on how it was (and wasn’t) influenced by Turkish. After moving to London and taking up my current post as Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Westminster, I started exploring the factors that play a role in whether the languages of the UK’s minority ethnic communities are passed on to younger generations of speakers.

I am especially interested in how languages change when they are transplanted to new geographical and social contexts as a result of migration. Cypriot Greek is the language that is closest to my heart, and the Grenglish Project is one of the initiatives to celebrate it, protect it and ensure that it has a bright future.