Category: Modern Greek

We saw that police reporter Spiros Leotsakos reported in 1963 that police officers Paxinos and Bourganis had recorded the underworld slangs of their time, and compiled glossaries. And one of those slangs, which Leotsakos says Bourganis recorded, was Lubinistika—as the language of female prostitutes rather than gay bottoms. The Lubinistika he recorded may not have […]

Petropoulos in his second edition accused the linguist Manolis Triantafyllidis of academic dishonesty, in the minimal information he gave about Kaliarda in his work on cants (which we saw included his important work on the builders’ cant Dortika, which is also based on Romani); he claims Triantafyllidis had researched Kaliarda extensively, but was too scared […]

Kaliarda is unintelligible on purpose, although you need to see extended instances for that to be obvious: not the song parodies that Petropoulos put in his appendix, which are merely Kaliarda-coloured Greek, or the Kaliarda you can find now on YouTube, but pieces like Pavrianos’ song Kaliardosynes, or indeed Klynn’s skit “Won’t One Faggot Speak […]

I’ve found the paper by Kyuchukov & Bakker on the gay cant of Istanbul. Spatholouro’s find and Montoliu’s had built up my expectations that this would be a carbon copy of Kaliarda, with the same polyglot amusements and compounding hilarity. Maybe it was; but the vocabulary Kyuchukov & Bakker recorded is just straight Romani words—like […]

Katerina Christodoulou’s 2016 thesis A lexicological analysis of slang vocabulary of Modern Greek is a thorough analysis of the morphology, semantics and pragmatics of multiple Greek slang variants, old and new, and of the colloquial use of obscenities. Kaliarda is one of the old variants studied; while most attention is given to contemporary youth slang […]

A Kaliarda adjective that poses an interesting etymological conundrum is musando “fake”. It is interesting both because it is in a chicken-and-the-egg relationship with Mainstream Greek Slang musi “fake”, and because the etymology of both could be Romani, Turkish, French, Greek, or likelier a conflation of all four. The data for this comes from a […]

I’ve already posted the etymological information from Montoliu’s 2005 paper on Kaliarda. This is what else the paper covers: p. 300. There is a Romani-based gay cant used in Istanbul. The Istanbul cant and Kaliarda share words and linguistic features, and may be related from Ottoman times. p. 301. Kaliarda is derived from Romani kaljardo […]

In this post, I give two somewhat extensive texts in Kaliarda, that give a better flavour of the language than I’ve found elsewhere—even if they don’t date from the 1960s, let alone the 1920s. The first is a 2013 pop song, Καλιαρντοσύνες “Kaliardadoms”, with lyrics by Giorgos Pavrianos, and sung by Betty Vakalidou; recall that […]