Professor Amalia Arvaniti, of the Department of English Language & Linguistics, is the recipient of a two-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2019-2021) for her project “Politics and Linguistic Variation in a Post-Diglossic Speech Community”.
Amalia will work on a monograph documenting changes in the Greek sound system as it evolved after the official abolition of diglossia in 1976, and recent developments – under the influence of moral panic due to the financial crisis in Greece – which have led to a revival of features from the diglossic era. Amalia will use social media to canvass views on these changes, will analyse speech samples and conduct perceptual sociolinguistic experiments to assess the role that these revived features have on the social evaluation of speakers and of diglossia-related registers of Greek.
