This page documents the various projects related to Greek dialects undertaken by those connected with the Laboratory for Greek Dialectology. At present, we are engaged in several projects:
1. Study of the Greek spoken in southern Albania, especially in town of Himara (Χειμάρρα) and the nearby Greek-speaking villages, in particular Palasa (Παλάσα) and Dhërmi (Δρυμάδες); this project has been undertaken by local members of LGD — Brian Joseph, Christopher Brown, Rexhina Ndoci, and Carly Dickerson — together with colleagues from abroad (Foreign Corresponding Members Alexander Novik, St. Petersburg, Russia; Andrey Sobolev, St. Petersburg, Russia; Aristotle Spirou, Athens, Greece; and Maïlinda Spirou, Athens, Greece:
An alley in Palasa (June 2015)
2. Cataloguing and scanning the materials on the dialect of Kephallonia collected by Renée Kahane (and donated by her son, Charles Kahane); then-Visiting Student Fellow Michalis Marinis began work on this project during his February 2019 visit; since then, Yanni Patitsas, funded through a Work-Study grant in 2020-2021 and a Career Accelerator grant in 2022, has been working on the project, aided in 2022 by Eirini Kellis — not only will all the materials be scanned and thus available as pdfs once the project is completed, but there will also be a detailed finding aid that will enable potential users to see what the scanned materials include.
The Renée Kahane Collection of Dialect Materials from Kephallonia
3. Developing, via a website (https://u.osu.edu/greek/), a resource for teaching and study of the Greek language in all its chronological phases, a project spearheaded by Christopher Brown and Foreign Corresponding Fellow Dr. Jerneja Kavčič (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia) with assistance from Director Brian Joseph.
4. Studying the Greek, and the Greeks, of Columbus and of Ohio more broadly, with the specific goal of documenting the use of Greek in Ohio, the dialect bases of the Greek language as spoken in Ohio, and the sociolinguistic situation for heritage speakers of Greek; this joint project involves Christopher Brown, Yiorgos Anagnostou, and Stavros Constantinou, as well as Brian Joseph.
5. Helping in the documentation of the old village dialect of Μεστά (Mesta), on the island of Chios (see Μεστούσικα page).