Νικόλαος Παντελίδης: Tο παλαιοαθηναϊκό ιδίωμα: Πηγές, μαρτυρίες, χαρακτηριστικά

The paper aims at offering a sketch of the history and a description, as complete as possible, of the dialect of old Athens on the basis of known, as well as hitherto unknown, sources, including the only surviving Athenian dialectal texts from the 19th century. The dialect belonged to a group that comprised the varieties of the nearby city of Megara and the Saronic Gulf island of Aegina, as well as of the southern part of the island of Euboea, and is generally regarded as one of the most poorly recorded Modern Greek varieties. The city of Athens became the capital of the modern Greek state after the Greek War of Independence in 1834 and consequently witnessed an immense influx of Greek speakers from all over the Greek speaking world, a process that heavily contributed to the dialect’s recession and final extinction by the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.