International Conference on the Dialect of Lesbos

Date: 04-Jul-2025 - 06-Jul-2025
Location: Mytilene, Lesbos island, Greece
Contact: Angela Ralli
Contact Email: [email protected]
Meeting URL: https://icdl.ct.aegean.gr/

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; General Linguistics
Subject Language(s): Modern Greek (1453-) (ell)
Language Family(ies): Indo-European

The dialect of Lesbos is one of the major dialects still spoken in Greece. It belongs to the group of Νorthern Greek Dialects, featuring, among other things, two phonological traits missing from the varieties of the south: high-vowel deletion and mid-vowel raising in unstressed position. The dialect of Lesbos displays an interesting vocabulary and a number of intriguing phenomena that reveal aspects of the diachronic evolution of Greek and contact with Turkish and Italo-Romance.
For the Modern Lesbian dialect, a first description was achieved at the beginning of the 20th century (see Anagnostou 1903, Kretschmer 1905), while recently, an electronic dialectal atlas has been created (https://lesvos.lmgd.philology.upatras.gr). Although various glossaries and dictionaries (e.g., Papanis & Papanis 2004, Ralli 2017) and dialect-based literature works (e.g., Psarianos 2024, Karna 2024) have been published, a systematic study and a grammar that would cover the totality of the dialectal variation of Lesbos are still missing.

The International Conference on the Dialect of Lesbos will bring together linguists and interdisciplinary scientists. It is hoped that, through their thorough and illuminative analyses, novel proposals will emerge and will shed light upon prominent grammatical and lexical dialectal phenomena that have so far passed unnoticed or are understudied. The sociolinguistic status of the dialect will be investigated, the relation of Modern Lesbian with the literature, theater and Ancient Lesbian will be tackled, and computational analyses will be proposed.

During the conference, there will be a presentation of the Dialectal Atlas of Lesbos, a theater play in the Agiasot variety will be presented in the town of Agiasos, and an exhibition of books and documents of the last two centuries will take place in Mytilene.

The conference aims at attracting the interest of the international linguistic community on the interesting varieties of Modern Lesbian. The conference is also expected to raise the awareness of the local community about the richness of its linguistic cultural heritage and contribute to the efforts carried out for its documentation and preservation.