Albanians in Greece and the social meaning of ethnolectal features in L2 Greek

Abstract

Albanian migrants in Greece constitute the largest ethnic minority in the country, amounting to roughly 5% of the total population. The reception of these Albanian migrants has not been smooth and rather has been marked by “extreme xenophobic and racist discourse” (Archakis 2020:5) towards the members of the ethnic community. This discourse is also evident online where it often takes the form of internet memes which target Albanians and their L2 Greek (Ndoci 2021, forthcoming a). In this paper I investigate the social perception of the features of this Albanian L2 Greek through a matched guise experiment. My findings show that individuals who produce Albanian L2 features in their Greek are negatively stigmatized, either overtly or covertly, similarly to the way in which Albanian migrants have been stigmatized in the Greek context. This stigmatization seems to be exhibited both by members of the ethnic group itself and by members of the host community (i.e. Greeks). Moreover, the two groups appear to have differential awareness of the systems of ethnic, regional, and accented Greek that is the product of their experience with the varieties.