What is not so (E)strange about Greek as a Balkan Language

Abstract

Back in the early 1980s, I was trying to raise some research funds for a project I had in mind involving Modern Greek, and I was looking at a Social Science Research Council (SSRC) brochure about their area studies grant programs. I saw that they had a program for “Eastern European countries” and one for “Western European countries”. I thought I had better check out both programs to see where my grant application belonged because Greece historically is both east and west, and could reasonably be considered as belonging in one or the other group. However, in looking at the list of Eastern European countries, I saw expected ones like Yugoslavia (then still intact), Albania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and others, and in the list of Western European countries, there was France, Germany, Italy, and so on, but I could not find Greece on either list. Just to be sure, I telephoned1 SSRC to inquire into the status of Greece from their perspective and was told that I was indeed reading the brochure right, and that Greek and Greece were no place, so to speak, neither east nor west. But of course we know where Greece is: it is planted firmly in the Balkan peninsula that occupies most of what can be called “Southeastern Europe” and geographically speaking, it is to the east of “eastern” countries like Albania or the Czech Republic or Slovakia, and to the west of truly eastern countries like Russia. My SSRC experience is emblematic of an attitude about Greece and about Greek that pervades much of the way Greece and the Greek language are treated in the scholarly world, that is, they are seen as neither east nor west, located