The Modern Greek dialect of the Karagouns in West Thessaly

Résumé 0

The theme of this dissertation is the research, prescription and examination of the modern Greek dialect of the Karagouns, a Greek population in West Thessaly, Greece. The geographical center of the dialect coincides with the central area of the geographical distribution of the population. It includes communities in the prefecture of Karditsa, which were located around the large marsh, now drained, almost at the centre of the plain of West Thessaly. The informants were elderly males and females who lived permanently in their villages, had not moved for a long time and were involved in the traditional occupations of the Karagouns. The research and the material collection took place in the physical premises of the informants, in their home or in the workplaces (field, pastoral place) where they felt comfortable and could speak without showing any tendency to correct their speech. The material recorded constitutes the sources for this linguistic and dialectological research. The goal of the thesis is to give a comprehensive prescription and analysis of the grammar and to examine other dialectological fields such as vocabulary, loans from other languages and the relation of the Karagoun dialect to other varieties in Thessaly. In the first part of this thesis, the nomination of the population is examined; the geographical, historical and cultural elements which also form their identity in Thessaly. In the second part all grammatical fields are examined. The analysis is developed in two axes, a synchronic approach particularly in phonetics and phonology and a diachronic view which attempts to document the relationship between this dialect and other northern Greek dialects. In the third part, archaisms contributing to the research of the relationship between Modern Greek dialects and medieval and ancient Greek are presented. In the fourth part, loans from foreign languages and Balkanisms are examined and quoted, since the Karagoun dialect is part of the Balkansprachbund.