Group belonging beyond language boundaries – language, religion and identity in the multilingual...

Concha Maria Höfler*

Group belonging beyond languageboundaries: Language, religionand identity in the multilingualGreek community of Georgia

DOI 10.1515/stuf-2016-0010

Abstract: In Georgia’s multilingual Greek community, the construction ofbelonging appears to be tied to religion and ancestry, with competence inStandard Modern Greek (SMG) not always being seen as necessary in order to“be Greek”. Forty-nine semi-structured interviews are analyzed, combining aquantitative and conversation analytical approach. Intriguingly, language com-petence in SMG does not always correlate with whether an interviewee deemsthis competence important for belonging to the Greek community. The inter-views are embedded in their historical and socio-political context to elucidatethe discursive resources interviewees may draw on when talking about therelationship between linguistic competence and belonging.

Keywords: Greeks in Georgia, language attitude, religious affiliation, construc-tion of belonging, conversation analysis

1 Georgia’s Greek community

Georgia is one of the post-Soviet countries with the greatest ethnic and linguisticdiversity –Wheatley (2009) lists 19 languages, of which Georgian, Russian, Azeriand Armenian are the most widely used (National Statistics Office of Georgia2013).1 Even in this diverse situation, the multilingual Greek community standsout due to the intriguing way its members fit the languages they speak into thecollective identities they construct. Linguistically, this community can bedivided into two subgroups: Pontic Greeks, speaking a Greek variety called

*Corresponding author: Concha Maria Höfler, Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences, EuropeanUniversity Viadrina, Große Scharrnstr 59, 15230 Frankfurt/Oder, Germany,E-mail: [email protected].

1 Judging from the number of pupils in schools with these languages as the main language ofinstruction.

STUF 2016; 69(2): 213–234

Angemeldet | [email protected] AutorenexemplarHeruntergeladen am | 01.07.16 16:31

Pontic Greek, and Urum Greeks, speaking a Turkic variety called Urum.2 Thesetwo varieties are mutually unintelligible, which means that community membershave to resort to a third language in order to communicate with each other. Inthe Georgian context, this could either be Georgian (especially for the youngergeneration), Russian (especially for older speakers) or Standard Modern Greek(SMG).3 What unites this multilingual community is a combination of sharedcultural background and shared socio-political experiences over the past200 years. Specifically, their origin on the Southeastern coast of the Black Sea,their belonging to the (Greek) Orthodox Church, their official classification as“Greeks” in the Soviet Union (Arel 2006; Sideri 2006), mass emigration in thepast 20 years (mainly to Greece, Cyprus and Russia, but also to other countriesfrom there onwards), and the perception of being part of a greater Greekdiaspora reaching back to the Byzantine Empire (Bruneau 1998; Sideri 2006).

The focus of this paper will be on perhaps the most pressing question thatemerges when considering this community for the first time. Namely, whether ornot the 49 informants consider competence in SMG – the language that inGreece is seen as a prerequisite for recognition as “Greek” – to be necessary inorder to “be Greek”. Why is this a question worth investigating? For one, the useof a specific language, variety or register allows speakers to associate them-selves with, or dissociate themselves from (social) groups they perceive in theworld. Speakers express how they want to be seen, what social group they wantto be affiliated with in their interlocutor’s mind, and thereby, how they positionthemselves in relation to other social groups that make up their world (Le Pageand Tabouret-Keller 1985: 181). These positions are stated, affirmed, contestedand negotiated in interaction (Bucholtz and Hall 2005; Georgakopoulou 2007;Hausendorf 2000; Kesselheim 2009; Roth 2005; Wodak et al. 2009). In manyinstances, a variety is turned into a symbol for a certain group (Tabouret-Keller

2 This is a purely linguistic – and therefore somewhat artificial – distinction made for purposesof scientific comparison. Interview partners are usually either confused by this categorisation orstress their perception of both types of Greeks being Greek. Furthermore, members of thescientific community that are also members of the wider “Georgian Greek” community haverepeatedly expressed discomfort concerning this classification. Thanks are due to DionysiosZoumpalidis for discussions on the topic. Still, in the context of the present study it is necessaryto compare speakers with differing linguistic backgrounds and it would be almost impossiblenot to label them at all for this purpose.3 Historically, Georgian Greeks especially in the rural districts of Ts’alk’a (more Urum speakingvillages) and Tetrits’q’aro (more Pontic speaking villages) have also communicated across bothgroups in Urum and/or Pontic. As many villages have been abandoned in the context of themassive emigration since the end of the Soviet Union and there are almost no speakers of Ponticleft in Ts’alk’a and almost no speakers of Urum left in Tetrits’q’aro, there is no need for thistoday and Urum Greeks in Ts’alk’a profess very little competence in Pontic, if any.

214 Concha Maria Höfler


1997), especially in the case of groups that are constructed and perceived to besomehow “timeless”, such as ethnic or national collectives.4

In the Southern Caucasus, popular imagination has Greek and its varietieslinked to the Byzantine Empire and thereby to Orthodox Christianity,5 whereasTurkish and its varieties are imagined as linked to Islam (Sideri 2006;Zoumpalidis 2014). While “Turkish” nationalism only became an issue towardsthe end of the Ottoman Empire (Içduygu et al. 2008), both the nascent Greekstate and the Georgian nationalist movements of the past 150 years heavilyrelied on both languages as symbols of the respective national identity (Sideri2006; Suny 1994). Additionally, during the Soviet Union, language policy wasmade up of a not-always-easy coexistence of strategies furthering russificationand unification that were juxtaposed with strategies aimed at strengthening“small nations” and their self-awareness (Hirsch 2005; Slezkine 1994).

The question to be answered, then, is how interviewees make sense of theserather strong links between language and nationality, and their community’sactual language competence. These in turn can be placed against the backdropof diverging collective memories (Assmann 2008) in which faith and/or “broth-erhood”6 take precedence over linguistic competence. To this end, a short over-view of the historical background will be given in Section 2. Section 3 brieflyintroduces the data and methodology used, Section 4 quantitatively explores thestatements made in the interviews. Section 5 looks at some of the interactive andrhetorical strategies employed in these more or less delicate moments of attri-buting or denying access to the group based on language competence. Section 6will finally bring all points together and embed the interviews in the socio-political and historic context that allowed members of this community to choosenot language, but other features like religion and ancestry as the main featuresdetermining the construction of their groupness. Precisely because this particu-lar case deviates in some ways from the “traditional” way of how language andbelonging are thought to relate to each other, it highlights the fact that languageis only one of a variety of resources used in establishing collective belonging.Thus, this special case may pave the way to a more holistic view on group-making – one that is nevertheless grounded in linguistic analysis.

4 On how nations are imagined cf. Anderson (1991); on how groupness, the feeling of belongingto a certain group, is created cf. Brubaker (2002); on The invention of tradition especially innation-building projects cf. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983).5 This is very much in line with the self-perception of my Georgian Greek consultants.6 The answer most often given in reply to the question how life was during the Soviet Union:my kak bratya zhili ‘we lived like brothers’. Transliteration of Russian and Georgian follows theBGN/PCGN standard (National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, 1949/2009).

Group belonging beyond language boundaries 215


2 Historical background

In this section, I will attempt a broad outline of the historical socio-politicalbackground against which my informants – consciously or unconsciously –openly or more covertly position themselves; in other words, the macro-context(Arendt 2011) of the interview situation. No single element of this outline can beisolated and used as the “ultimate” explanation for the answers given to thequestion on language competence and belonging to the Greek community. Itdoes serve, however, as the “ethnographic field knowledge”, in the sense ofDeppermann (2000) that is necessary for a meticulous analysis of the interviewsin the context of the life worlds of my interview partners.

During the better part of the Ottoman Empire, and certainly until the time ofthe first big migratory wave of my interviewees’ ancestors in 1828, non-Muslimswere organized into the so-called millet system, which was especially used fortaxation and based solely on religious belonging rather than on any concept ofethnic or national affiliation (Mackridge 2009). Nevertheless, the ancestors of thepeople I describe here as “Georgian Greeks” were already labeled “Greek” in theofficial Ottoman censuses when they left the Ottoman Empire for the Southernperiphery of the Russian Empire Sideri (2006: 32).

[T]he prominent non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire, its Greek-Orthodox,Armenian-Gregorian and Jewish communities, were granted communal autonomy in spiri-tual as well as secular areas, including their religious, educational, juridical and fiscalaffairs. In the Ottoman imperial system even though there existed an absolute practice ofhegemonic power of Muslim-centred control over the empire’s non-Muslim populations,and the unequal and subordinate position of non-Muslim communities was quite clear,these communities had been granted state recognition and protection in the Islamictradition (Içduygu et al. 2008: 362).

Importantly, until the advent of the Young Turks in 1908, there seems to have beenvery little effort by the Ottoman administration to homogenize the population interms of its religious or linguistic make-up, i. e. to convert Greek OrthodoxChristians to Islam or to enforce the use of the state language Osmanlıca‘Ottoman language’7. Inequality had more to do with the language of officialcommunication being Osmanlıca and Turkish, and non-Muslim communitiesbeing taxed much more heavily (Göl 2005; Içduygu et al. 2008; Prévélakis 1998).Note that this runs counter to the reasons my Urum Greek informants give for theirspeaking a Turkish variety rather than a Greek variety. Even though gradual

7 “[A] mixture of Turkish, Arabic and Persian” (Göl 2005: 125). “Turkish” is only proclaimed theofficial language in the Empire’s first constitution of 1876 (Göl 2005: 129).



linguistic assimilation due to growing economic ties across Eastern Anatolianvillages and towns seems a much more plausible explanation for their shift toTurkish (Eloyeva 1994; Sideri 2006), they claim to have been forced to choosebetween giving up their faith or their language. Not wanting to part with theirfaith, they chose to change their language, as the popular myth has it.8

Arriving in the Russian Empire from 1828 onwards, the Greeks from the OttomanEmpire were welcomed as “fellow Orthodox Christian brothers”, and were settled inareas of Russian military presence – for example in the rural regions of Ts’alk’a andTetrits’q’aro (Bruneau 1998: 27). The Russian Empire pursued russification policies –rather mild in comparison with those of the Soviet Union –with the aim of linguisticchange, on the one hand, and exchanges of Muslim for Christian populations on theother (Allen and Muratoff 1953: 107f; Xanthopoulou-Kyriakou 1991: 359 f.). AllowingGreeks from the Ottoman Empire to migrate into the Russian Empire has to be seenin light of this broader political strategy.

Throughout the duration of the Soviet Union, the various Soviet govern-ments oscillated between working towards a nationless Soviet community andbolstering national affiliation. They even created new “nations” to begin with(Hirsch 2005; Slezkine 1994), while on the other hand pushing extensive russi-fication and homogenization of the education and labor systems with the goal ofunifying the state (Suny 1998). The endurance and strengthening of nationalaffiliations, on the other hand, was perceptible even after this had ceased to bean important political goal at the end of the 1920s. One instance was school –and to a lesser extent university education – in the mother tongue of the“autochthonous” Soviet nationalities.9 At least one outcome of this was that“people came to identify language with national identity” (Sideri 2006: 165).

Another practice was the fact that Soviet internal passports listed both citizen-ship (Soviet) and nationality on the basis of the national affiliation of an indivi-dual’s parents, thereby making changes to national (hereditary) affiliationimpossible (Arel 2006: 8).10 This “rendered an inherently liquid identity into asolid commitment to a single ethnocultural group” (Suny 2001: 867), and has beeninterpreted as preparing the ground for ethno-national tensions in the wake of thecollapse of the Soviet Union (Arel 2003, 2006; Brubaker 1996; Suny 2001).

8 Zoumpalidis (2012: 265) reports the same reasoning for his Greek informants in the NorthernCaucasus. Those Greeks who did preserve the Pontic Greek variety lived in their majority in themore mountainous regions on the South-eastern coast of the Black Sea (Fotiadis 1998: 63).9 Georgian Greeks, having only migrated fairly recently in comparison to other people living onthe territory of the Soviet Union, had lesser access to this measure (Sideri 2006: 79).10 Children of “mixed marriages” were made to choose between either of their parents’ nation-alities at the age of 16. Newly independent Georgia discontinued this practice in the mid 90s.



Moving closer to the present, today’s Georgians can trace their “Georgianness”back through a substantial written (and pre-written) history. If one chooses tofollow this “project” in the sense of Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), the Georgiannation-building endeavor started with the conversion to Orthodox Christianity ofthe Georgian nobility, and the development of the Georgian script in the fourthcentury. Fuchslocher (2010) argues that the conception of a “Georgian nation”based on the autocephalous Georgian Orthodox Church (and language, but sheemphasizes religion) pre-dates the advent of national movements that “Western”scholarship has attributed to the period surrounding the French Revolution(Hobsbawm 1990) and the rise of capitalism (Anderson 1991). This analysis verymuch matches the wider Georgian discourse that sees the Georgian church andlanguage as the two strongholds that allowed the Georgian nation to “survive”centuries of invasions and foreign rule (Smith et al. 1998; Suny 1994).

In Georgia, then, “a discourse of purity and authenticity” (Sideri 2006: 52)emphasizes religion and language, offering various opportunities of (dis-)junc-tures to minorities in touch with, and possibly agreeing with or contesting thisdiscourse, as will become apparent below (cf. Section 6). The option of empha-sizing religious belonging rather than competence in SMG is not an option inpresent-day Greece or Cyprus, though. From the beginning of the Greek nationalproject, and beyond its first steps as a sovereign state in 1827, nation-buildingwas a demanding task, with language – and the Greek Orthodox Church – verymuch at its centre: “[T]he purity of the language was a foundation stone of theKingdom of Greece in the 1830s. Language remains a prerequisite for integrationinto Greek society, affecting all the migrants living in the country” (Sideri 2006:141 f.). This does not mean that the unification of varieties leading to thesettlement on what is today known as Standard Modern Greek was straightfor-ward. Far from it, the decision on what should be the standard language wasideologically so closely tied to the project of Greek national identity – which inturn was felt to have to be tied to the long history of “Greece” – that SMG wasestablished as the national language only in 1976 (Mackridge 2009).

3 Data

I interviewed a total of 49 Georgian Greeks, 23 of whom still speak, or havea family history of speaking Urum11 (age range: 19–77, average age: 43.9,

11 I.e. speakers whose direct ancestors still speak or used to speak Urum. Note that this doesnot necessarily mean that the interviewees themselves are competent speakers of Urum – orPontic Greek in the case of speakers with Pontic Greek as the heritage language.



13 female, 10 male), and 26 of whom still speak or have a family history ofspeaking Pontic Greek (age range: 19–81, average age: 50.5, 14 female, 12 male).Interviews were held both in the bigger cities of Tbilisi and Batumi (11 Urum and10 Pontic Greeks) as well as the rural areas of Ts’alk’a, Tetrits’q’aro and Ach’ara(12 Urum and 16 Pontic Greeks). These locations were chosen because place hasbeen shown to be an important variable in the construction of belonging for thiscommunity (Höfler 2011). Interview length ranged from 30 to 90 minutes.Interviewees were offered the choice of the (main) language used in the inter-view, with the majority opting for Russian. Switches into Georgian did occur,and were made possible by the presence of my colleague Nika Loladze, whosenative language is Georgian. The semi-structured interviews covered a broadrange of topics designed to allow an insight into the socio-economic andpolitical transformations in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, andinto the factors and processes that establish belonging in the Georgian Greekcommunity. The question whether the interviewee deems it necessary to speakGreek in order to be Greek was usually placed somewhere in the final third of theinterview. At this point, stable rapport and trust had already been successfullyestablished, and we had always already spoken about the interviewees’ lan-guage competences in general, in their respective heritage language and abouttheir attitude towards the latter.12

All interviews were recorded and later transcribed following GAT 2 (Seltinget al. 2009),13 annotated and analyzed using the software package EXMARaLDA(Schmidt and Wörner 2009).

4 Language competence does not predictlanguage attitude

Forty-nine interviews collected across two putative communities in both urbanand rural settings are hardly representative. Nevertheless, a broad quantitativeapproximation may – and in this case does – point out a number of explananda,some of which are to be expected and some of which are not. Before looking at

12 In this context (which in many cases included just having discussed potential differencesbetween Pontic Greek and SMG), it was clear that po-grecheski ‘in Greek’ in the question nuzhnoli govorit’ po-grecheski chtoby schitat’ sebya grekom? ‘is it necessary to speak Greek in order toconsider oneself Greek?’ refers to SMG and not to Pontic Greek.13 I am grateful to Anno Chkhaidze, Ani Chutkerashvili, Sophio Gachechiladze, Gvantsa Jishkariani,Nino Ushikishvili and Mariam Varazashvili for their incredible help in the transcription process.



whether competence in SMG is seen as a prerequisite for “being Greek”, let’shave a closer look at the actual competence in SMG as professed by the inter-viewees, given in Table 1. Noteworthy is that just over a third of both Urum(34.8%) and Pontic Greeks (38.5%) state high levels of competence, a thirdreport little to some competence, and the last third no competence whatsoever.In other words, the difference between both communities is only noticeable inthe range from “little competence” (26% Urum vs. 3.7% Pontic) to “somecompetence” (4.2% Urum vs. 19.2% Pontic). Note, that these are the speakers’self-assessments, and not the outcome of any type of production or perceptionexperiment. The high level of asserted incompetence in SMG of Georgian PonticGreeks may appear surprising, as these two varieties are not mutually unintel-ligible. Pontic Greek informants stating their incompetence in SMG may eitherlack the exposure to SMG that would be necessary in order to realize theproximity of both varieties, or they may no longer be competent speakers ofPontic Greek themselves.

So, is competence in SMG seen as necessary for Greekness? Table 2 showsthe answers for both communities. The categories “yes”, “no” and “no answer”are self-explanatory, the first two comprising those informants who answeredthe question directly and without hesitation, as well as those who took sometime to elaborate their opinion and ended up with rather clear “yes” or “no”answers. The category “desirable”, however, demands some explanation. It is, infact, a good example of how categories of a qualitative analysis stem not only

Table 1: Self-assessed language competence in SMG.

competent some competent little competent not competent total

n % n % n % n % n %

Urum . . .

Pontic . . . .

Georgian Greeks . . . .

Table 2: Is competence in SMG necessary in order to consider oneself Greek.

yes desirable no no answer total

n % n % n % n % n %

Urum . . . .

Pontic . . . .

Georgian Greeks . . . .



from theoretical considerations,14 but arise from an open examination of thedata (Glaser and Strauss 2007). In response to the question nuzhno li govorit’po-grecheski chtoby schitat’ sebya grekom ‘Is it necessary to speak Greek in orderto consider oneself Greek?’ one interviewee gave a slight shrug, a smile and theanswer nu zhelatel’no ‘well, it’s desirable’. He thereby conveyed the wholespectrum of knowing and possibly agreeing with the ideal that equates belong-ing with the use of a particular language, excusing his own shortcomings interms of possessing only little competence in SMG, and finally knowing andtaking into account the actual language competence in his community, which isfar from the portrayed ideal. The response “desirable” was so evident in manyinterviews – either explicitly stated or more implicitly inferred from the storiestold in answers to this question – that it became inconceivable to apply anyother label to this category. Those interviewees who started with a clear “no”and then talked themselves toward a “desirable” in the following minutes werealso placed in this category.

Looking at the results in Table 2, the Pontic Greek community appears to befairly cleanly split between those answering “yes” and those answering “no”(both at 38.5%). Urum Greeks display a high proportion of answers in the“desirable” category (34.8%), a proportion of “no” a little higher than PonticGreeks at 43.5% and only four informants who answered “yes” (17.4%). Notably,all four Urum “yes” answers were given in the countryside.15 For Pontic Greeks aswell, there were more informants from rural areas answering “yes”.16 In all othercategories, however, there was no clear split between urban and rural areas.Taking the Georgian Greek community as a whole, there is a surprisingly highpercentage of speakers who do not consider competence in SMG a prerequisite for“being Greek”: a whopping 40.8% of all informants.17 Taking the answers of“yes” (28.6%) and “desirable” (22.4%) together still accounts for the majority ofinformants. However, the fact that so many interviewees answered “no” in a waythat gave no impression of doubt is not trivial, and calls for an explanation –which I will attempt in Section 6.

It would be entirely plausible if language competence and attitude correlatedin the way that competent speakers of SMG deemed competence necessary, and

14 This may have led to this category being called “unsure” or “maybe”, which is not afelicitous description of the verbalised attitude.15 Out of a total of 12 interviews with Urum Greeks in the countryside and 23 with Urum Greeksaltogether.16 7 out of 10 “yes” answers, from of a total of 16 interviews with Pontic Greeks in rural areas.17 Interestingly, this is in line with the numbers Zoumpalidis (2013: 240) reports for Greeks inthe Northern Caucasus.



those with no competence did not. One could also expect that this correlationwould not hold for Pontic Greeks, who could take their link to “Greekness” fromspeaking or having a family history of having spoken Pontic Greek. Interestingly,this is not clearly borne out, as can be seen in Figures 1 and 2.18 While there is acorrelation between not speaking SMG and not deeming this competence neces-sary for Greekness, the opposite is not true. Especially for Urum Greeks, theanswers are fairly evenly spread across all levels of competency, while thecorrelation appears to be stronger for the Pontic Greek interviewees.

Figure 2: Pontic Greeks: Competence in and attitude on the necessity of competence in SMG.

Figure 1: Urum Greeks: Competence in and attitude on the necessity of competence in SMG.

18 The 4 instances of “no answer” to this question have been omitted from the figures.



Only 17 interviewees (34.7%) have personal experience of migration, while29 (59%) claimed no experience whatsoever, not even seasonal labor migration,which was a topic mentioned quite often in the interviews. Interestingly, perso-nal migration experiences do not seem to play a decisive role in the attitudesexpressed regarding whether or not speaking Greek is necessary for“Greekness”. Thus, people who have spent some time in Greece in fact do notconsider competence in SMG to be more important than those who have not.19

Similarly, while education does play a role in many other contexts, it does notby itself explain the results obtained. Age has an effect on competence in SMG,with younger people in both groups being more likely to speak SMG. Age doesnot, however, correlate with interviewees’ likeliness to consider this competencenecessary for “Greekness”.

5 Argumentative strategies between “lawsof nature” and subjective feelings

In order to illustrate the abovementioned numbers and proportions, the answersof two speakers, AL20 and NB, will be analyzed regarding the strategies they usein explaining and justifying their answers. The strategies of other speakers willbe alluded to briefly in order to “thicken” my analysis. Both speakers in a wayrepresent the two extremes of the continuum between “yes” and “no” answers tothe question on the relevance of SMG for Greekness.21

AL is a Pontic Greek woman in her late 50s who lives in a small villagein the rural Tetrits’q’aro region, and was unemployed at the time of the inter-view, having previously worked in the local administration. NB is an Urum

19 They may still be exposed (and many are) to their relatives’ and friends’ stories about life inGreece and Cyprus and take their attitude from those interactions, of course.20 All speakers have been anonymized and provided with arbitrary acronyms. Choosing “real”names for them is next to impossible, unfortunately, as both first and surnames are highlycoded for national affiliation in the Southern Caucasian context. My interview partners havenames that would be categorised as Greek, Georgian, Russian or “internationally Christian” –interestingly, none are bearers of recognisably “Muslim” names.21 The category “desirable” appears to be expressed mainly by speakers torn between an idealequating belonging with a language symbolic for that collective and their own and/or theircommunity’s competence. The way speakers circumvent and negotiate this apparent mismatchbetween attitude and language competence is highly interesting and will be discussed in moredetail in a forthcoming publication.



Greek woman in her late 20s who lives in Tbilisi and looks after her two smallchildren, having previously completed a university degree. As described inSection 4, the fact that AL speaks SMG and considers SMG to be a necessarycondition of Greekness, whereas NB speaks only very little SMG and does notconsider SMG to be necessary, is not representative of the distribution in thesample.22

(1) 1 CH: obyazatel'no li govorit' po-grecheski chtobynecessary whether to_speak Greek so_that

2 schitat' sebya grekom (---)to_consider self Greek‘is it necessary to speak Greek in order to consider oneself Greek?’

3 AL: °h chtoby sebya schitat' h° toy natsii ne tol'koso_that self to_consider of_that nation not only

4 [grekom][Greek]‘in order to consider oneself of that nation, not only [Greek]’

5 CH: [mhm][mhm]

6 AL: [gruzin]om russk[im] obyazatel'no nado znat' yazykGeorgian Russian necessarily must to_know language‘[Georgi]an or Russ[ian] it is necessary to know the language’

7 NL: [hm][hm]

8 CH: [mhm][mhm]

9 NL: [hm][hm]

10 AL: ya tak schitayu h° bez yazyka ty ne n:I so consider_I without language you not

11 ty ne etoy natsiiyou not of_that nation‘I think like this, without language you’re not, you’re not a part ofthat nation’

22 [ ] indicate that two interactants speak at the same time; °h indicates the drawing of breath;(-), (–) and (—) indicate short pauses, (1) a longer break of the duration of one second. CH refersto myself, NL to Nika Loladze.



12 NL: hmhm

13 AL: °hh da (1) nuzhen yazykyes needed language

‘yes, language is necessary’

In example 1, AL very clearly states that in order to belong to a nationalcollective, language competence in the language which is symbolic for thiscollective is indispensable (lines 3–6). In offering a list that extends this state-ment not only to belonging to the Greek nation, but also to other nations like theGeorgian and Russian ones, she presents the rule she claims for Greekness as noexception, but as following a universal norm.23 In line 10, she starts her nextturn with a slight mitigation ya tak schitayu ‘I think like this’ before repeating,and thereby strengthening her statement that belonging to a national commu-nity is impossible without language competence (lines 10–11). In line 13 shefinally completes her answer with the general assessment that language isnecessary for Greekness. While AL almost only refers to “objective facts” abouthow the world works to her mind, NB resorts mainly to her subjectivity andfeelings in replying to the same question:

(2) 1 CH: e nuzhno (-) em: govorit' (-) po-grecheski (-) emmust to_speak Greek

2 chto by byt' grek (1) chto ty dumaesh' (-)so_that to_be Greek what you think_2SG‘is it necessary to speak Greek in order to be Greek, what do youthink?’

3 NB: net ne obyazatel'no (-)no not necessarily‘no, not necessarily’

4 CH: ne obyazatel'no (--)not necessarily‘not necessarily’

5 NB: ty m: (-) ya i tak grechanka [ya v dushe]you I and so Greek_F I in soul‘I’m Greek even so, [I’m in my soul]’

6 CH: [da][yes][yes]

23 In the analysisof interactive strategies describedhere I followRoth (2005)unless statedotherwise.



7 NB: grechankaGreek_F‘Greek’

8 CH: mhmmhm

9 NB: a esli ya ne znayu grecheskogo yazyka eto neand if I not know_I Greek language this not

10 znachit chto ya ne grechankameans that I not Greek_F‘and if I don’t know Greek, it doesn’t mean that I’m not Greek’

11 CH: mhmmhm

12 NB: ya lyublyu i gretsiyu i grekov i pontitsev yaI love_I and Greece and Greeks and Pontics I

13 vsekh lyublyuall love_I‘I love Greece, Greeks and Pontians, I love them all’

14 CH: [mhm][mhm]

15 NB: [ya grech]anka v dushe tak chto mne ne nado (-) neI Greek_F in soul so that me not need not

16 obyazatel'no znat' grecheskiy chtoby (--) vot tynecessary to_know Greek so_that here you

17 nemka daGerman_F yes‘I’m Greek in my soul and that’s why I don’t need to know Greek,like, you’re German, right?’

18 CH: [mhm][mhm]

19 NB: [esli ty ne] znaesh' nemetskogo (-) chto ty neif you not know_2SG German what you not

20 nemka poluchaetsyaGerman_F turns_out‘[if you didn’t] speak German would you then not be German?’

21 CH: [((chuckles)) da]yes

[((chuckles)) yes]22 NB: [ty zhe nemka vsë] ty znaesh' chto ty

you same German_F all you know_2SG that you



23 nem[ka]German_F‘[you’re still German, that’s all,] you know that you’re Ger[man]’

24 CH: [mhm][mhm]

25 NB: morchafinished‘that’s all’

NB first answers the question in the negative (line 3) before proceeding to explainher reasons starting in line 5. She does not allude to some universal norm like ALdid, but rather immediately refers to her own situation, and her status as beingGreek despite her lacking language competence. She locates Greekness withinherself, in her soul. It thereby turns into an essential part of her that is not alteredby her language competence (9–10). This is repeated and strengthened in line 15–16. In between lines 12–13, she expresses her love for everything to do with Greeceand Greeks both in Greece and abroad, thereby showing that Greekness is notonly an essential part of herself, but that she also has the “correct” feelings thatare in line with and contribute to this Greek core. In lines 16–17, she switchesattention away from herself and uses my own national affiliation as an example toprove her point. I knew her for quite some time before the interview, and duringthe interview we had also already spoken about differences and similaritiesbetween Georgia and Germany. That she firstly re-establishes my Germanness,which she is very much aware of, really brings this affiliation to the foreground ofthe conversation, and thereby to our joint attention. Her rhetorical question aboutwhether I would somehow suddenly lose this affiliation if I did not speak German(19–20) is thus even stronger, and readily acknowledged by me with a chuckle. tyzhe nemka vsë ‘you’re still German, that’s all’ (22) is her first closure of thissequence, with vsë ‘everything’ “that’s all” functioning very much as the endpointof her argument – and one from which it would take some conversational work onmy part to enter into the discussion of the same question again. She strengthensthis endpoint even more, however, by first appealing to my knowledge about thisessential part of myself, and then really closing the topic by switching to Georgianwith morcha ‘finished’ “that’s all” (25). This is the only time in the interview thatshe switches to Georgian when talking to me. So, she not only repeats the closingelement vsë, she repeats it in a language that in this context is highly marked.24

24 She is very aware of my Georgian competence (or rather my lack thereof), and during theinterview uses Georgian only when talking to her husband and children, thereby making Russianthe “interview language” and Georgian the “non-interview language” in this specific context.



While NB sticks very much to her own feelings, as well as the exemplary“proof” (my national affiliation) afforded by the interview situation, she never-theless constructs something like a universal of national essentialism by usingme as an example and proving that her answer is true not only for her own case,but also for me, and by extension for all nationalities. In answering the questionabout the relation of competence in SMG and Greekness, speakers tend to drawon both personal experiences and what they perceive to be universal normsregarding national affiliation and language competence. Interestingly, both areused to argue for both points of view. Personal experiences in Greece and/orEurope in general may be portrayed as – perhaps rather unsurprisingly –necessitating competence in SMG, on the one hand. On the other, speakersarguing the opposite draw on the language-teaching programs in Greece orclaim to have been so thoroughly shaken by the Greek/European non-compli-ance with the ius sanguinis that they “no longer know what a Greek is” (OP).25

Explicitly or implicitly, speakers either perceive national belonging as some-thing that goes hand-in-hand with language competence, or as some essentialcore that has nothing to do with something as “superficial” as a language – seenin this context purely as a means of communication.

NB’s example 2 is a little extreme in that she gives no reasons for herperception of some essential Greek core; that is, she does not allude to religionand/or ancestry as most other speakers do when they feel the need to “justify”their being Greek without bringing language competence into the argument.26

This “deviance” makes it so interesting to try and get behind her sense ofbelonging, even though her interview is not necessarily one that offers manypoints of departure for anything resembling an explanation.

6 Discussion: Belonging with and withoutlanguage competence?

Looking at the statistical data in Section 4, the questions to be explicated concern– The high proportion of speakers that do not consider competence in SMG a

prerequisite for Greekness;

25 The claim that in Greece, and the European Union in general, everybody can claim belong-ing to whatever national collective they please, is of course a stark exaggeration of both thelegal situation and the attitude of the societal majority.26 Note that answers to this question along the lines of “it’s enough to feel Greek” are alsoreported by Zoumpalidis (2013: 241) for his Greek interviewees in the Northern Caucasus.



– The mismatch between a speaker’s own stated competence in SMG andwhether s/he considers this competence to be necessary;

– The existence of the category “desirable” and the considerable proportion of(especially Urum Greek) speakers making use of it.

From the qualitative analysis of the interviews in Section 5, the question arises:What led speakers to express rather strong “yes” or “no” answers with verysimilar argumentative strategies?

Overall, there are two main points from which a discussion towards anunderstanding of the more surprising outcomes of the broad statistical picturemay start. The first is the historical perspective, retracing the group-makingfactors in the various socio-political contexts in which the Georgian Greeksfound themselves, starting from the Ottoman Empire until the end of theSoviet Union. Jumping to the present, the second regards the current societalmajority in Georgia and Greece and their take on the relationship betweenlanguage and belonging. This necessarily includes a focus on the minoritysituation of Greeks in Georgia, and the situation in which Post-Soviet Greekimmigrants find themselves in Greece (and similarly in Cyprus).

A third point could be made on the differences between Pontic and UrumGreeks – not in terms of the number of answers (apart from the “desirable”category), but in terms of HOW this question is answered. The argument wouldhold that for Pontic Greeks, it is easier to position themselves squarely in eitherfield because hereditarily they have access to “Greekness” via Pontic Greek. This“essential bond” would hold even if they do not speak either Pontic Greek orSMG themselves. This would be why they answer the question in most casesstraight away either affirmatively or negatively – drawing on one of the manyideologies afforded by the discourse, but not needing to “justify” theirGreekness. While there is much supporting this line of thought (including thecategory “desirable” being prominent for Urum Greeks but not so much forPontic Greeks), the fact that competence in SMG correlates with Pontic Greekbut not Urum Greek interviewees’ attitudes on this point casts some doubt on thestraightforwardness of this “common-sense” expectation of how belonging andlanguage competence come together in the case of Georgia’s Greek community.

As described in Section 2, belonging to the “Greek” community in theOttoman and Russian Empires was based mainly on religious affiliation ratherthan on language use. Although NB does not draw on this resource to explainher position in the excerpt given above, many other speakers do. Anotherfrequent strategy is to allude to “Greek” ancestry alongside Greek OrthodoxChristianity. An explication of the often implicit argument would be along thelines of: “Our ancestors were persecuted in the Ottoman Empire because they



were Greek Orthodox Christians, therefore we are Greek as well” – with compe-tence in SMG taking a back seat.

This stance of belonging to a Greek community even if an identity markerlike language is absent may have been strengthened by the Soviet passportpolicies introduced above. By “fixing ethnicity in identity documents” (Arel2003), these policies led to the perception of diverse national groups under theumbrella of the Soviet Union – and to the conviction that everybody had adistinct national identity. That the antagonism between both currents – thehomogenizing and the particularizing – in Soviet policy-making has not beenfully settled either way is illustrated at least in part by the answers given to thequestion on the importance of language competence in SMG. Instances of theformer having succeeded up to a point are illustrated in the “Soviet brother-hood” that many informants speak about as missing and in their high level ofcompetence in Russian. That neither russification27 nor their or their commu-nity’s (limited) language competence in SMG is perceived as taking away fromtheir “Greekness” may be linked with this strong assertion of national affiliationmanifested in their passports. On the other hand, Georgian Greeks like AL, whoview language as a symbol of national affiliation, found and find ample groundsfor this in Soviet mother tongue education as well as (later) in the Georgian andGreek national(ist) discourse as depicted in more detail above.

Moving to the second discussion point, how might a self-identified member ofa minority position herself against this backdrop of discourses on history andnational belonging, bearing in mind that at least some members of what sheconsiders her own community do not comply with the standards set by thesemajoritarian discourses?28 Minority situations are special in a number of ways,and Georgian Greeks are in two fundamentally different situations in Georgia andin Greece. In Georgia, “Greekness” is very much associated with the ByzantineEmpire – and Ancient Greece, of course. That the Georgian Greek community linksitself to Byzantine history raises no questions in this context and is shared knowl-edge across both societal minority and majority. Additionally, in minority situa-tions, high competence levels in whatever the “corresponding” language would beare not always necessary. Instead, certain lexical items or phrases may be enough

27 In Georgia, russification was seen as a tremendous danger to Georgian national identity(Hewitt 1989; Suny 1994).28 Note that neither Eleni Sideri’s nor my own interviewees reported awkwardness in speakingeither hereditary language in the family. Difficulties arise rather when forced to label them-selves: “Awkward moments arose when they had to define their ‘mother tongue’ in strict termsand they felt that this definition would express their national and political allegiance” (Sideri2006: 176).



to signal belonging to a different group. Even in the case of Urum-speakingGreeks, religious affiliation and the stories of their plight suffered at the hand of“the Turks” may further strengthen the Orthodox Christian bond.

Ruptures emerge when language is pitted against religion in the struggle ofdefining the core of national belonging. The Georgian Greek minority is subjectto this struggle, mainly in the rural regions of Ts’alk’a and Tetrits’q’aro as aresult of massive Greek emigration and subsequent internal migration ofOrthodox Georgians from Svaneti and Muslim Georgians from Ach’ara. Apartfrom economic disputes over land and housing, this has also made the questionconcerning the importance of language and religion more relevant. Some UrumGreek interviewees in Ts’alk’a have spoken of being reprimanded by the internalmigrants for speaking “Turkish” and therefore lacking in “Greekness” due totheir language use – even if their adherence to the Orthodox faith is notquestioned at the same time. On the other hand, when speaker SC in Ts’alk’aclaims that ethnically and linguistically Georgian Muslims from Ach’ara cannotpossibly be “Georgian” without the “correct” religion, he relies on the impor-tance of religion not only within his community, but for Georgian nationalaffiliation rules per se. Fittingly, he is an informant who does not considerlanguage to be an important marker of belonging. Note that from both pointsof view, the outsiders are constructed as somehow “Turkish” – either due totheir language use or due to their religious affiliation.

This unsettling situation was aggravated by the simultaneous experiencesGeorgian Greeks have made and continue to make in Greece, where nationalaffiliation without competence in SMG is unthinkable (Kaurinkoski 2010;Mackridge 2009). Consequently, immigrants of the last 25 years from the formerSoviet Union are labeled “Russian” and only very slowly accepted as “Greeks”.The basic premise for this acceptance is, moreover, their fluency in SMG andtheir refraining from speaking Russian and/or Urum in public.29 Even thoughOrthodox Christianity plays a significant role in present-day Greece, belongingto the Greek national collective in everyday situations is first and foremostdetermined by the (proficient) use of SMG.

This is, in short, how the historical socio-political background supplies myGeorgian Greek interview partners with possible starting points or openings toposition themselves with regards to the question whether SMG is necessary for“Greekness”. Speakers, then, are informed by a variety of ideologies emphasizingeither the importance of religion, language or both. The rather strong assertions inthe direction of either “yes” or “no”, as given by AL and NB, hint at speakers

29 Cf. Zoumpalidis (this volume) for Greeks from the former Soviet Union not being recognisedas “Greeks” in Cyprus unless they speak SMG.



drawing on very different resources afforded by the historical, political and socio-cultural context they find themselves in. This to a certain extent also explains themismatch between many speakers’ own stated competence in SMG and theirattitude on whether or not this competence is necessary for belonging to thewider Greek collective. The knowledge about language competence in SMG inthe Georgian Greek community may additionally support speakers in not postulat-ing this competence as a necessary prerequisite for Greekness, as this might entailexcluding even family members from the community. Where attitude does notmatch their own or their community’s language competence, speakers may – andin the case of Urum Greek interviewees do – take the “exit strategy” of pointingout the general desirability of language competence.

Acknowledgements: This research is supported by a PhD-scholarship by theHeinrich Böll Stiftung and the research project The impact of current transforma-tional processes on language and ethnic identity: Urum and Pontic Greeks inGeorgia led by Konstanze Jungbluth and Stavros Skopeteas and funded by theVolkswagen Stiftung. I am grateful to Nika Loladze for our shared fieldworkexperiences and to Dominik Gerst, Tobias Heinze, Georg Höhn, KonstanzeJungbluth, Stavros Skopeteas and Rita Vallentin for their reading of and com-menting on drafts of this article.

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