Greeklish, a portmanteau of the words
Greek and
English, also known as
Grenglish,
Latinoellinika/
Λατινοελληνικά or
ASCIIThe American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
Greek, is
Greek languageGreek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical...
written with the
Latin alphabetThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.During the...
. Unlike standardized systems of Romanization of Greek, as used internationally for purposes such as rendering Greek proper names or place names, or for
bibliographicBibliography , as a practice, is the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology...
purposes, the term
Greeklish mainly refers to informal, ad-hoc practices of writing Greek text in environments where the use of the
Greek alphabetThe Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to...
is technically impossible or cumbersome, especially in electronic media. Greeklish is commonly used on the Internet when Greek people communicate by
e-mailElectronic mail, often abbreviated as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages, designed primarily for human use...
,
IRCInternet Relay Chat is a form of real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfers via Direct...
,
instant messagingInstant messaging is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. The text is conveyed via devices connected over a network such as the Internet.-Overview:...
and occasionally on
SMSShort Message Service or Silent Messaging Service is a communication service standardized in the GSM mobile communication system, using standardized communications protocols allowing the interchange of short text messages between mobile telephone devices...
.
Sometimes, the term Greeklish is also used informally for a non-standard language variety used by bilingual speakers of English and Greek, i.e. Greek with heavy admixture of English words or vice versa.
History
Some older traditions of using the Latin alphabet for Greek existed in earlier centuries. The term
frankolevantinika properly refers to the use of the Latin script to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism. ("Frankos" is the Greek and Levantine term for Western European, and by extension Roman Catholic.) This usage was part of the broader tendency in the region for script to follow creed (e.g. Greek script for Turkish Orthodox Christians -- "karamanlidika", and the use of Greek and Arabic script in Albania), and was routine in the Venetian-ruled Aegean in the Early Modern era. Indeed, the autograph manuscripts of several Greek literary works of the Renaissance are in Latin script (e.g. the comedy
Fortounatos by Markos Antonios Foskolos, 1655). This convention was also known as
frankohiotika/
φραγκοχιώτικα, "Catholic Chiot", alluding to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of
ChiosChios is the fifth largest of the Greek islands, situated in the Aegean Sea, seven kilometres off the Asia Minor coast. The island is noted for its strong merchant shipping community, its unique mastic gum and its medieval villages...
. Hearkening back to this established term, a common (but derogatory) term for Greeklish is
frankovlahika/
φραγκοβλάχικα -- "hillbilly Western" (exploiting the negative cultural stereotype among ethnic Greeks of the
VlachsVlachs or Walachians is a blanket term covering several modern Latin peoples descending from the Latinised population in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe...
).
Orthographic and phonetic Greeklish
Greeklish may be
orthographicThe orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example for Kurdish, there can be more than one orthography. Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthós and γράφειν...
or phonetic. In orthographic use, the intent is to reproduce Greek orthography closely: there is a one to one mapping between Greek and Latin letters, and digraphs are avoided, with occasional use of punctuation or numerals resembling Greek letters rather than Latin digraphs. While letters are in the first instance chosen for phonetic similarity, visual equivalence, and corresponding keyboard keys, are used when phonetically similar letters are exhausted. Thus, psi (ψ) may be written as
ps; xi (ξ) as
x ; and theta (θ) as
th.
In phonetic use, there is no concern to reproduce Greek orthography, and the Greeklish is a phonetic transcription (usually with English phonetic norms, sometimes with other languages' like German) of Greek words --- although often there is a mixture of the two. In particular,
iotacismIotacism is the process by which a number of vowels and diphthongs in Ancient Greek converged their pronunciation to sound like iota in Modern Greek.-Instances of iotacism:...
is preserved: the various letters and digraphs now pronounced as /i/ are transcribed as
i, and not differentiated as they are in an orthographic scheme (e.g.
h,
i,
u,
ei,
oi for η ι υ ει οι). In a phonetic scheme, xi is usually
x or
ks;
ks is used if
x has been chosen, following orthographic norms, for chi (χ). Psi and theta will usually be the digraphs
ps and
th.
An example of
orthographicOrthographic may refer to:* Orthographic projection** Orthographic projection ** Orthographic projection * Orthography...
Greeklish could be the word
"plateia", which in Greek means
"square" and using the Greek alphabet is spelled
"πλατεία". The word
"plateia" derives from the exact replacement of each Greek letter with its Latin respective: π=
p, λ=
l, α=
a, τ=
t, ε=
e, ι=
i, α=
a.
An example of phonetic Greeklish could be the same word,
"square", written like this:
"platia". The reason the same word is, in this occasion, written without the letter "e", is the fact that, phonetically, the word "square" in Greek sounds
exactly like this:
"platia" (since -"εί"- is now pronounced /i/, as an instance of iotacism).
The most extreme case of orthographic Greeklish, which achieves the greater optical resemblance to the Greek prototypes, is perhaps the so-called "byzantine" or "arabesque" or "calligraphic/artistic" Greeklish introduced in the
Hellas mailing list by the mathematician
George Baloglou. Main characteristics of Baloglou's "byzantine" is the distinction of σ and s (σ=
c ς=
s), the distinction οf lower and upper letters, such as π=
n, Π=
TT or
5, θ=
8, Θ=
0 or
Q, ψ=
y, Ψ=
4, and the unusual, but with great resemblance with the Greek prototype, transliterations σ=
c, π=
n ρ=
p Ρ=
P.
Books written in Greeklish
Giannis Androutsopoulos (see References) talks about
"Exegesis", a book in Greeklish that was
published by Oxy Publications in 2000. The Greeklish transliteration was based on the Greek
translation of the original book written by Astro Teller. A novel about Artificial Intelligence,
it describes a computer program that has acquired a "mind" of its own. The original book was written
entirely in the form of e-mail messages, something that prompted Mr. Androutsopoulos and his collaborators to publish a version of it in Greeklish.
Web sites written in Greeklish
Most Greek personal or informal web sites were written in Greeklish in the past. Today this is not the case, as the use of Greeklish on a web site is considered inappropriate. It has been considered by many as an act of
vandalismVandalism is the behaviour attributed to the Vandals, by the Romans, in respect of culture: ruthless destruction or spoiling of anything beautiful or venerable...
of the Greek language. However, there are still many Greek web sites which utilize Greeklish.
Greek companies which use Greeklish
Some
Internet Service ProviderAn Internet service provider is a company that offers its customers access to the Internet...
s in Greece use both Greek and Greeklish in their emails. For example, the corporate announcements sent to users via email are usually written in English, Greek, and Greeklish.
Use in advertisements
As of 2008, business advertisements using greeklish have appeared in Attiko Metro and other areas. Companies that used greeklish in some of their advertisements include
Pizza HutPizza Hut is an American restaurant chain and international franchise based in Addison, Texas , offering different styles of pizza along with side dishes including pasta, buffalo wings, breadsticks, and garlic bread...
and
ForthnetForthnet S.A. is a Greek Internet Service Provider established in October 1995 by Minoan Lines SA and theFoundation for Research & Technology - Hellas , also known as FORTH....
.
Use in business communication
Use of Greeklish for business purposes or business communication is considered as a lack of business ability or respect.
Current trends
Around 2004 a hostile movement against Greeklish appeared in many Greek online Web discussion boards (forums) where Greeklish was the primary "language" of communication. Administrators threatened to ban users who continued to use Greeklish, thus making the use of Greek mandatory, but using Greeklish failed to become a serious reason to get banned. Examples include the
Translatum Greek Translation Forum, the
Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network Forum, the
Venus Project Forum, the
adslgr.com Forum, the
e-steki.gr forum, the
Greek Technological Forum and the
e-foititis.gr greek student forum. The reason for this is the fact that text written in Greeklish is considerably less aesthetically pleasing, and also much harder to read, compared to text written in the Greek alphabet. A non-Greek speaker/reader can guess this by this example: "δις ιζ χαρντ του ριντ" would be the way to write "this is hard to read" in English but utilizing the Greek alphabet.
A counter argument used by forum users is that a lot of users live abroad, and write from computers they don't own (university or internet cafes). There, they don't have the ability to write in Greek (lack of
fontIn typography, a font is traditionally defined as a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
s or proper locale), so Greeklish is the only option (because it's much simpler than it seems).
On Greek
IRCInternet Relay Chat is a form of real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfers via Direct...
and
IMInstant messaging is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. The text is conveyed via devices connected over a network such as the Internet.-Overview:...
, most of the time only Greeklish is used.
It is considered by some that Greeklish is dangerous for the cultural integrity of the
Greek languageGreek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical...
. However, others disagree and although they do not support wide use of Greeklish, they do not consider it an intimate threat.
Not withstanding the loaded politics of Greeklish, jocular use of English, transcribed into Greek and then transliterated into Greeklish, shows how users can manipulate the use of script to ironic effect: if a user, in the middle of a Greeklish conversation, types "dis iz xarnt tou rint" for "this is hard to read" (transliterated via δις ιζ χαρντ του ριντ), they are ironically distancing themselves from their
code-switchingCode-switching is a linguistics term denoting the concurrent use of more than one language, or language variety, in conversation. Multilinguals, people who speak more than one language, sometimes use elements of multiple languages in conversing with each other...
to English, doubly ironic since the script is Roman but the orthography effectively Greek. (One might retort that this is aesthetically displeasing—but of course that is the point.) This artifice is particularly widespread on the
Hellas mailing list.
Wide use for Greeklish in long texts is nowadays (2006) unusual. It is still used, however, among friends as an informal, alternative means of communication for short messages.
Another current trend in Greeklish is the introduction of
LeetLeet or eleet , also known as "leetspeak", is an alphabet used primarily on the Internet for the English language. It uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters. The term is derived from the word "elite", and the usage it describes is a specialized form of symbolic...
phrasing and vocabulary. Many Leet words or slang have been internalized within the Greek spoken language through Greek gamers online in games such as
World of WarcraftWorld of Warcraft, often referred to as WoW, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994...
.
Examples:
| Greeklish | Explanation An explanation is a set of statements constructed to describe a set of facts which clarifies the causes, context, and consequencesof those facts....
|
|---|
| Tsagia |
"Good bye", being a word meaning tea Tea is the agricultural product of the leaves, leaf buds, and internodes of the Camellia sinensis plant, prepared and cured by various methods...
s, but jokingly used as ciaoThe word ciao is an informal Italian verbal salutation or greeting, meaning either "goodbye" or "hello". Originally from the Venetian language, it was adopted by Italians and eventually entered the vocabulary of English and of many other languages around the world...
in supposedly plural |
| Re c |
Pronounced "re sy" meaning roughly "you" |
| Kalimerez, Merez |
Kalimeres (καλημέρες), meaning (Good) Mornings; note that the final z is inspired from byez |
| Tpt |
Tipota (τίποτα), meaning "nothing" |
| Dn |
Den (δεν), meaning "not" |
| M |
Mou (μου), meaning "my" or "mine" |
| S |
Sou (σου), meaning "your" or "yours" |
| n |
na (να), meaning "to" or en (εν), meaning "not" in cypriot dialect |
| tr |
tora (τώρα), meaning "now" |
| smr |
simera (σήμερα), meaning "today" |
| klnxt |
kalinixta (καληνύχτα), meaning "goodnight" |
| tlm |
ta leme (τα λέμε), meaning "we will talk again" |
| sks |
skase (σκάσε), meaning "shut up" |
| kn1 |
kanena (κανένα), meaning "no one" |
| dld |
diladi (δηλαδή), meaning "so, therefore" |
| vrm |
variemai (βαριέμαι), meaning "I am bored" |
Cypriot variant
Cypriot GreekThe Cypriot dialect of Greek, known as Kypriaka , Cypriot Greek , or simply Cypriot, is spoken by 750,000 people in Cyprus and hundreds of thousands abroad.-Usage and settings:...
has a distinct form of Greeklish, which reflects Cypriot phonology; for instance
j can indicate the phone , which is written in Cypriot Greek as τζι-, and corresponds to palatalised /k/ in standard Greek. For instance, Standard Greek και /ke/ "and" = Greeklish
kai/
ke; Cypriot τζιαι = Cypriot Greeklish
tziai or
je. Cypriot Leet/Instant Messaging use of Greeklish reflect this. For instance:
Cypriot Greeklish:
ego n 3ero re pe8kia.. skeftoume skeftoume omos tpt.. n mporo na me fantasto na asxoloume tin ipolipi m zoi me ena single prama.. kathe mera jini i idia i doulia. enna spaso. omos me tes epilogies p ekama .. tino pros iatrika j etsi.. (http://www.varkoume.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=558876&sid=07416b68bb274b6bb6954cba283449bb , 2006-03-25 )
Cypriot Greek:
Εγώ εν ξέρω ρε παιθκιά... σκέφτουμαι σκέφτουμαι όμως τίποτε... εν μπορώ να με φανταστώ να ασχολούμαι την υπόλοιπή μου ζωή με ένα sinle πράμα... κάθε μέρα τζιείνη η ίδια η δουλειά. Εννα σπάσω. Όμως με τες επιλογές που έκαμα... τείνω προς ιατρικά τζιαι έτσι...
IM-isms: n = en εν "not" (in Standard Greek: d = den δεν); tpt = tipote τίποτε "nothing" (tipota τίποτα in Standard Greek); j = je τζιαι "and"
Καλημέρα, πώς είστε;
- Greeklish 1: kalimera, pos iste? (phonetic)
- Greeklish 2: kalhmera, pws eiste; (reconciling with spelling rules) (Baloglou's "byzantine" variant: kalhmepa, nws eicte;)
- Typing as if the keyboard layout were set to Greek, when it is actually set to US English: Kalhméra, pós eíste?
Another use
Greeklish can be used as well as to express a greek meaning through an english word, a usage which is only recognized by people who have experienced the true nature of greek culture and lifestyle. Here are some characteristic examples:
katsikoulations
katsikoulations(phrase,expression): it is a word inspired from the english word congratulations which means "well done".It derives from the greek words
κατσικι=goat (in greeklish katsiki) and/or
τσικουλατα=chocolate (in greeklish tsikoulata) and has the special meaning of "bravo! well done, good job, but we expect that kind of things from you so don't get too excited or anything"...
Greeklish-to-Greek conversion
Since the appearance of Greeklish there have been numerous attempts to develop applications for automatic conversion from Greeklish to Greek. Most of them can cope with only some of Greeklish transliteration patterns and can be found and downloaded in the Internet. The first complete system for automatic transcription of Greeklish into Greek, obtaining correct spelling is
All Greek to Me! , developed and provided by
Institute for Language and Speech Processing
The first open online application for the transcription of Greeklish to Greek, was developed by Artificial Intelligence Group at University of Patras, named deGREEKLISH.
An initiative has started to create a freely-available, open-source converter using user-supplied word transliteration:
Greeklish OUT!. A similar open source Greeklish converter, written in the C# programming language, is available as a
stand alone program.
External links