This is an interview I gave last February for an English-speaking Cyprus newspaper. It was never published, but maybe it would be of some interest to the general public.
1. Has the youth’s language notably shifted recently due to TikTok and short-form video platforms?
There are two things to keep in mind here. The first is that every generation of young people have their own terms, catchwords, and mannerisms – sometimes up to even a linguistic variety we could call slang. These typically die away when this particular generation grows up, leaving few if any traces behind in the discourse of the many.
Second, knowing the first thing about language acquisition and language change one would be extremely suspicious of any presumption that short video platforms would have had any impact on anyone’s language, besides the introduction and circulation of said expressions, terms or mannerisms – expressions and terms which would have found a way to circulate among the young anyway.
2. Are there historical cases where external influences caused genuine linguistic contamination?
Define ‘contamination’. The term simply makes absolutely no sense when we talk about language. On the other hand, borrowing (mainly of words), is continuous among the world’s languages and this has been the case since the emergence of human language, whether we recognise all the cases of borrowing or not. I mean, even words like οθόνη and παράδεισος are loanwords…
3. Should the idea that languages can become "corrupted" through word borrowing, be a valid concern for the speakers?
No. Would anyone characterise contemporary English, with around 70% of its vocabulary being of non-Anglo-Saxon origin, as a corrupt language? Also notice the fetid and somehow morbid terminology employed here, when we talk about contamination, corruption, and similar medical calamities.
4. Given the Cypriot dialect's history of external influences, why do speakers object to social media slang reshaping it today? Is change not the natural progression of language?
As I said, slang hardly “reshapes language”. Consider all the French slang terms used in Standard Modern Greek between the 1920s and the 1960s: where are they now? Let me also once more stress that there is no linguistic variety that has not undergone extensive “external influences”, as you call them: Cypriot Greek is not exceptional in this.
5. Does perceived linguistic purity correlate with speakers' sense of cultural identity?
Probably yes, but “linguistic purity” is a wild fantasy, and a poorly defined one for that matter. I mean, purity in what sense? Purity as the absence of what? Would this linguistic purity mirror some kind of cultural purity? Do we really wish to indulge in the fantasy that ‘pure cultures’ exist after the Agricultural Revolution? The whole thing just doesn’t make any sense.
6. Should Cypriot dialect/language speakers worry about youth slang additions?
No, but they will. Youthspeak has been a cause for moral panic since ancient times. Let me also point out that the Greek variety spoken in Cyprus is called ‘Cypriot Greek’.
7. To what degree do slang terms like "chillάρω" (to chill) and "cringάρω" (to cringe) enter everyday speech to fill vocabulary gaps, such as lacking a Greek verb for "cringe"?
If they do fill such gaps then they might survive, otherwise they will fade away, just like lots of slang terms have done so in the past. Of course, there is also a chance that they may later be replaced by other terms: hardly anyone in Greece calls smart dress ‘αμπιγιέ’ anymore.
8. Does adapting borrowed words with a Greek verb ending like -ω indicate a language's strength?
Again, one needs to define ‘strength’, which applied to language is virtually inconsequential: English became a world language well after its whole inflectional morphology (noun suffixes, verb inflection and the like) was reduced to rudiments after the Middle English period. Is English strong nowadays?
The truly interesting question here is why we can borrow nouns almost as they are (ραουνταμπάουτ) but we need to adapt them to the Greek inflection if they have to be used as verbs (σκρολλάρω). It is this kind of questions we should be asking, because they reveal something about the nature of language.
9. Does language mixing lead to language death?
No, English is alive and well although it is definitely the product of extensive and continual language mixing between 800 CE and today: first Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, then Old English and Norman French; then followed a truly massive influx of Latinate and other loanwords.
10. Should Cypriots fear language death from such external influences?
If we definitely have to talk in terms of fearing something (here we go again with the rhetorics of fear, corruption, death etc.), my personal opinion is that Cypriots should ‘fear’ the replacement of Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek with English every time the discourse switches to serious, technical, or just complex topics.
11. Should the public be concerned that social media slang might replace traditional Cypriot words?
What is so special about what you call social media slang, as opposed to any other slangs? Slangs are localised, registers of language restricted to a specific purpose, and with limited shelf life.
12. Is the perceived youth literacy decline linked to new slang vocabulary from social media?
As my colleagues who have looked into this matter more seriously than I have will tell you, the decline in literacy has to do with how language is taught or not taught in the school system, and not due to some kind of social media influence or what not. Remember that before social media it was text messaging that would destroy literacy, with television and comics before that, and radio in even older times.
