Against the backdrop of conservation of intangible linguistic heritage and the need for scientific documentation of local privacy, the University of the Aegean, at the International Digital Learning Conference (ICDL 2025), is organizing a special section dedicated to Lesbian Dialect 4 to July 6th.
Lesbian, one of the most characteristic varieties of the northern dialectical space of Modern Greek, stands out for its phonological phenomena, such as “deafness” and “stenosis”, which do not occur in the southern dialects. It includes linguistic elements that are either recovered from earlier phases of Greek, or have emerged from contacts with other languages, mainly Turkish and Italian-roman.
Despite the remarkable attempt to capture the lexics of Lesbian (with dictionaries and glossaries such as Papani & Papani, Ralli, but also recent literary works in local idioms), the absence of a modern, systematic grammatical imprint of the variety remains felt.
The main objective of the ICDL unit is twofold: on the one hand, to bring scientists to study the lesbian dialect and the dialectical discourse in general, on the other, to raise awareness of the local community about the value of the idiom it preserves.
During the work, analyses will be presented for linguistic phenomena and the modern sociolinguistic reality of Lesbian. Responses will be sought to issues that have been open for decades and emphasizing the importance of linguistic diversity to the homogenization of the common modern Greek.
Significant parallel actions include:
- Presentation of Lesbian Digital Dialectic Atlas
- Theatrical performance in Agiassotika by the Theater Group of Agiassos
- Exhibition of books and forms in Lesbian, with material covering two centuries
- Honorary Discrimination against Lesbians who have contributed to their work to rescue and disseminate the idiom
