The Modern Dialect of Lesbos: Selected Topics

Dear Colleagues,

The dialect of the Aegean island of Lesbos (hereafter Lesbian Greek) is one of the major Modern Greek dialects. It is spoken by a population of approximately 90.000 people, but in recent years, the frequency of its use has been decreasing, especially among the younger populations, who tend to shift their interest to Standard Modern Greek. Thus, Lesbian Greek could be characterized as an endangered linguistic variety, although recently, there are efforts to safeguard and revitalize it.

Linguistically, Lesbian Greek belongs to the group of Northern Greek dialects, which are delimited by two phonological phenomena that are absent from the Southern varieties, namely, the deletion of the unstressed high vowels /u/ and /i/ and the raising of the unstressed /e/ and /o/ (see, among others, Papadopoulos 1927, Papazachariou & Ralli 2022). The dialect displays an interesting range of phonological, morphological and morphosyntactic phenomena, while its vocabulary reveals aspects of the diachronic evolution of the Greek language, missing from other Modern Greek varieties, and of contact with other languages, specifically, Turkish and Italo-Romance (Ralli 2019a, 2021).

In the beginning of the 20th century, a preliminary documentation was achieved by Paul Kretschmer (Kretschmer 1905), while recently an electronic dialectal atlas was created depicting the linguistic variation of the 79 villages of Lesbos (Alexelli 2021, Ralli 2019b). In the past fifty years, various glossaries and dictionaries have been published, focusing on a number of varieties of major villages and towns of the island (see, among others, Papanis & Papanis 2000, Ralli 2017),

but a contemporary systematic documentation is still missing, and modern linguistic studies are rare (see, among others, Gafos & Ralli 2002).

The proposed Special Issue brings together scientists who are interested in linguistic varieties other than the standard. Their articles deal with phenomena displaying a challenge to established linguistic theories, as well as with issues concerning areas such as language contact, contrastive linguistics and computational linguistics. Most articles constitute elaborated versions of the works presented at the First International Conference on the Dialect of Lesbos (Mytilene: July 4–6, 2025; https://icdl.ct.aegean.gr), while other articles are added to complete the range of interesting topics regarding the dialect. All contributions will be peer-reviewed and the deadline for submitting draft copies is January 31st 2026. After the process of revision, the final versions of contributions will be ready for publication, around the end of August 2026.

It is hoped that, through the thorough and illuminative 23 works published in this Special Issue, novel proposals will emerge to shed light upon prominent phenomena that are found in Lesbian Greek and have passed unnoticed. Similarly, the sociolinguistic status of the dialect will be scientifically approached. It is expected that the articles of this Special Issue will attract the interest of the international linguistic community and highlight the significant variation displayed by Lesbian Greek and the attitude of its speakers, the majority of whom resist the sweeping influence of Standard Modern Greek. It is anticipated that they will also trigger the awareness of the local community about the richness of its own language and the need to support the efforts carried out by a number of people for its defense and preservation.

Select Bibliography

Alexelli, V. 2021. Μapping the dialectal variety of Lesbos. Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Patras (in Greek).

Gafos, D. & A. Ralli. 2002. Morphosyntactic features and paradigmatic uniformity in two dialectal varieties of the island of Lesbos 2002. Journal of Greek Linguistics 2: 41–73.

Kretschmer, P. 1905. Der heutige lesbische Dialekt. Wien: Holder. Papadopoulos, A. 1927. Grammar of the Northern Greek Dialects. Athens (in Greek).

Papanis, D. and G. Papanis. 2000. A dictionary of the Agiasot variety. Agiasos: Community of Agiasos (in Greek).

Papazachariou,. D. & A. Ralli. 2022. Dialectology and Modern Greek dialects. In M. Lekakou & N. Topintsi (eds.), Introduction to Dialectology. Athens: Gutenberg, 1–41 (in Greek).

Ralli, A. 2017. A dictionary of the dialectal varieties of Kydonies, Moschonisia and North-eastern Lesbos. Athens: Institute of Historical Studies (in Greek).

Ralli, A. 2019a. Greek in contact with Romance. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.422

Ralli, A. 2021. Contrasting Romance and Turkish as source languages. Evidence from borrowing verbs in Modern Greek Dialects. Journal of Language Contact 14: 220–252.

Ralli, A. 2019b. Linguistic cartography. The electronic dialectal atlas of Lesbos. In G. Karla et al (eds.), Lexeis. Athens: Kardamitsa, 433–453 (in Greek).

Prof. Dr. Angela Ralli
Guest Editor

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