Preface

 

The archive of the Greek dialects recordings is addressed to those initiated into any field of Linguistics (e.g. Phonetics, Morphology, Sociolinguistics, Dialectology, Pragmatics, Discourse, etc.), as well as Literature (e.g. Prose, Poetry, etc.), at an academic level.

Being scientifically responsible for the creation of this archive, I have collected all the fieldwork recordings of most of the Greek dialects still spoken on the mainland and the islands, made by my graduate and undergraduate students through my courses on Morphology and Language Documentation.

The main scope of this program was to motivate my students towards fieldwork research studies on the Greek dialects. After a systematic collection of recordings and the annotation of all the linguistic material under my supervision, they conducted a morphophonological analysis of a dialect assigned to them which they later presented in the classroom. Moreover, their work was discussed among students and further evaluated by me. So, apart from the experience they acquired in getting involved in writing original fieldwork projects, their interest in such an activity arose for further research. They also presented a good number of Diploma Theses and four MA Theses on a morphophonological analysis of Greek dialects based on fieldwork research.

The database was decided to be available on the site of the Department of Theoretical & Applied Linguistics, School of English, Aristotle University (Dept. meeting No. 10, 4 June 2015).

The archive includes only the recordings of a large number of the Greek dialects (but not their transcription). It is free of charge for future researchers of disciplines such as Linguistics, Literature, Sociology, Dialectology, etc. It is an extremely fruitful work which has been in the process since 2006.

For the creation of the Greek dialects database I have co-operated with Anastasios (Tasos) Paschalis, computer engineer at the School of English, AUTH. Without him, this archive would not have come to light. After archiving the recordings, Tasos created a data base in which the prefecture, the village or town where the dialect is spoken, the year the recording was made, and the names of students who conducted the recording are listed. Then he made a webpage drawing the recorded data and showing them on Google maps. In total 185 research papers with 2.414 recordings have been filed.

Elizabeth Mela-Athanasopoulou
Associate Professor, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
School of English
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki