FROM THE BRINK: REVIVING GREEK VIA HEBREW

It is, perhaps no coincidence that Φάρος, the Greek word for lighthouse and thus a beacon to guide one to safety and ensure their survival, rhymes with Χάρος, the shady mythological figure whose job it was to guide the souls of the no longer living across the Acheron River, into the land of Hades. Sooner or later, despite the best efforts of the former, an encounter with the latter is inevitable. To exhaust the death motif to its ultimate tortuous extent, if sarcophagy describes the process by which flesh is feasted upon and is decomposed, then glossophagy denotes the manner in which one language is slowly subsumed by another.

We are living in the era of the palliative care of the Greek language in Australia. Linguists consider gradual language death to occur when the people speaking that language interact with speakers of a language of higher prestige. This group of people first becomes bilingual, then with newer generations the level of proficiency decreases, and finally no native speakers exist. One by one, despite our best efforts, Modern Greek Studies courses disappear from the tertiary syllabus and those that remain, do so on life support. We scratch our heads and wonder why after twelve years of Greek school classes, our progeny cannot construct a coherent sentence in that language that does not include the words souvlaki, Mykonos and rezili, all the while pondering why, in a community that has so many resources and numbers over a hundred thousand, only182 students studied Modern Greek at VCE level in Victoria.

Meanwhile, the lingua franca of our community, the one in which our press releases and media posts is conducted in, is now predominately English and not Greek. Beyond the pretty photos, the printed propaganda, the carefully crafted adulatory and self-congratulatory stage-managed gatherings and panegyria, this is the ugly truth of the precipice we are perched upon. We don’t like it. It makes us feel as uneasy and self-conscious as when we are forced into a situation where we have to speak Greek because we have no choice and there is no escape. Somehow, and we can’t fathom why, we feel personally responsible for the loss of a language which many of us know, but don’t really want to speak anymore, even though we all agree it is such an important part of our identities. On occasion, when we wax lyrical about the size and vitality of our community, our thought processes begin to take us down the path of trying to calculate how much time and money has gone into creating and maintaining our Greek language schools, and how better off we would have been as a community instead if we had taken those funds and allocated them towards property investments instead. But then again, we are supposed to be a nation of entrepreneurs, and we banish those thoughts within seconds.

There are many reasons for our failure, and the solutions we from time to time come up with in our fora, our conferences and our discussions, don’t seem to be working. Throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. Amalgamating Greek schools doesn’t work. Glossy calendars and photos of smiling students learning Greek dancing doesn’t work. Yet for some reason, up until now, our focus has not been on the examples of languages brought back from the brink of, or indeed, of total extinction.

The only language that has come back from the dead has been Hebrew, in Israel, after over a millenium. Dispersed far from their ancestral homelands, Jews adopted the dominant languages of the countries in which they lived, or adapted these to their purpose, while retaining Hebrew as a revered holy language. However, towards the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century, a movement began for the revival of the Hebrew language that reached its apogee after the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel. What kept the memory of Hebrew alive, was its liturgical use and the conviction of those who revered it, that even if they did not understand it, its memory was worth preserving. What ensured its revival was pure ideology and nationalism: a burning conviction that a people should speak their own tongue, one that would express their history, their aspirations an unite them. Remarkably, this endeavour worked, with Yiddish and Ladino, the erstwhile tongues of the European diaspora, now becoming endangered.

While the Jewish experience is unique and cannot be compared to our own, there are lessons and parallels to our own history that can provide inspiration as we try to drag our language back from the brink: Firstly, sheer willpower and the absolute belief that speaking the tongue is necessary. In the eighteenth century, Saint Kosmos the Aetolian traversed western Greece, exhorting, cajoling, pleading with and demanding that the local inhabitants speak Greek to each other and their offspring, instead of Vlach, Arvantic and the other idioms that they had adopted. That this is a slow and painful process is beyond doubt. When Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who wrote the first modern Hebrew dictionary and was responsible for creating much of its vocabulary began his attempts to convince his compatriots to speak solely in Hebrew, only four families could do so. Yet in the fullness of time both of these visionaries had their dreams for language revival fulfilled.

There are flaws in seeking to follow this approach to the letter. Both revivals are a corollary to a national project that is pertinent to the people who reside in the countries created by those projects. Significant state resources over a long period of time have been allocated so as to ensure public knowledge of Greek and Hebrew in those countries. In Australia, however, the dominant class does not share our linguistic history and the experience of the diaspora is different. Of the 99,956 Australians who identified as Jews in the 2021 Australian census, 10,844 or just one ninth stated that they spoke Hebrew. In contrast, in the same census, of the 424,750 Australians identifying as Greek, 229,643 or approximately one half stated they spoke Greek, the extent of their fluency being unknown.

There are also other differences. While the Greek identity has been centred largely around Greece and its language throughout its historical discourse (and of course, the Greek language has been spoken continuously within its homeland for the past four millenia and in its peripheries), the Jewish identity developed by necessity in a centrifugal fashion with more diverse points of reference. Nonetheless, the fact remains that sheer willpower, an almost missionary zeal facilitated the revival of a defunct tongue. It is this imperative for re-genesis, that could provide a source of inspiration for our own community. Before we do so, however, we would have to face the elephant in the room. For all our lip service to the key role of Greek civilisation in humanity, we have already adopted the language of those we subconsciously accept are of higher prestige. The inhabitants of Israel chose to embrace a language that gave them prestige. Our relationship with our identity in this country, is a more ambiguous one. Regardless, the Hebrew experience also teaches us something else that is value: the contexts in which, if language loss is to occur, a selection of ingredients can be preserved, to form the seeds of revival in the future.

There are other languages which, although never extinct, have had their decline arrested: Welsh, Hawaiian and Basque to name but a few. In this case, such a revival came as a consequence of state intervention and language policy. Once upon a time, our community was heavily invested in language policy in this country, but as the definition of multiculturalism has evolved over time, this no longer seems to be of priority. Perhaps it is time this changed.

Whatever the future may hold, we cannot, like the Bourbons before us, continue on as before, having forgotten nothing and learnt nothing. If we are serious about language retention, let us study the success stories and learn from them, drawing upon the strengths of our own cultural memory. The time is now.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 15 March 2025