Language mixing in Palasa

Abstract

We explore here several kinds of language mixing to be found in the Greek-Albanian bilingual speech community of the village of Palasa in southern Albania. Palasa is of particular interest for Greek dialect studies because it offers a window in the present day into highly localized dynamics of language contact. Among the mixing observed in Palasa is code-switching, motivated by various factors as identified by Myslín & Levy 2015, borrowing, both lexical and structural, and hybridization, at a number of levels of analysis, including phonology, morphology, and semantics. Our findings indicate that language contact is still alive and well in the Balkans at least at the level of village dialects.