Attitudes of Russian L2 learners of Greek towards the Greek Language Varieties of Cyprus

Abstract

The present study focuses on the language attitudes of Russian L2 learners of Greek - who reside in Cyprus - towards Cypriot Greek (CG) and Standard Modern Greek (SMG) in the light of pluricentricity theory (Clyne, 1992; Muhr, 2003, 2005; Muhr, 2012). The matched-guise technique (Lambert, 1960; 1967; Evripidou, 2011) was implemented and 50 L1 Russian participants were asked to evaluate the personal qualities of bi-dialectal speakers through the use of the Likert-scale questionnaire and recordings which were used in Evripidou’s study (2013). Participants completed the semantic differential scale and assessed the recorded passages of the same speakers on two different guises: CG and SMG. The results showed that L2 learners of Greek with L1 Russian background tend to have a more positive attitude towards SMG than CG. Overall, people who speak SMG are considered to be kinder, more sincere, educated, attractive, friendly, modern, hard-working, intelligent, and have a better sense of humour than speakers of CG. When comparing and constructing the results with Evripidou’s study (ibid), these appear to be mainly in disagreement. In general, Russian L2 learners of Greek who live in Cyprus, have a negative attitude towards CG, an unofficial variety of the pluricentric language (Greek), while they seem to favour SMG, the official variety.