This volume brings together scholars from different disciplines, with a variety of perspectives, linguistic and literary, historical and social, to address issues of control, prescription, planning and perceptions of value, processes of establishing a standard and practices and ideologies of standardization, over the long history of the Greek language, from the age of Homer to the present day. With a wide range of topics, from contested educational initiatives to competing understandings of the Greek language, from the Hellenistic koine to cyber-Greek, the volume provides a series of informed overviews and snapshots of telling cases that both illuminate the history of Greek and explore the nature of language standardization itself. The volume will be important for students and scholars of the Greek language, past and present, and, beyond the Greek example, for sociolinguists, historians and social scientists with interests in the role of language in the construction of identities.

Alexandra Georgakopoulou is Reader in Modern Greek Language & Linguistics, and Michael Silk is Professor of Classics, both at King's College, London, UK

I: Establishing a Standard; 1: The Invention of greek: Macedonians, Poets and Others *; 2: The Greek Koine and the Logic of a Standard Language; 3: Primary Education in a Non-Standard Language as a Tool of Social and National Integration: The Case of Vernacular Greek, 1923-30; 4: Greek With No Models, History or Standard: Muslim Pontic Greek *; II: Standardization Practices; 5: The Lexica of the Second Sophistic: Safeguarding Atticism *; 6: Grammatical Metaphor and the Function of Participles in High-register Versions of the Life of Aesop *; 7: Orthographic Standardization of the Modern Greek Classics: Gain and Loss; 8: Correcting the Courtroom Cat: Editorial Assaults on Cavafy's Poetry *; 9: Modern Greek Dictionaries and the Ideology of Standardization *; 10: Greek in Cyprus: Identity Oscillations and Language Planning; 11: 'Greeklish': Transliteration Practice and Discourse in the Context of Computer-Mediated Digraphia; III: Ideologies and Contestations; 12: A Tradition of Anomaly: Towards the Regularization of the Greek Language; 13: Mothers and Daughters, Roots and Branches: Modern Greek Perceptions of the Relationship Between the Ancient and Modern Languages; 14: Constructing a Science of Language: Linguistics and Politics in Twentieth-Century Greece *; 15: 'Language Issues' after the 'Language Question': On the Modern Standards of Standard Modern Greek *; 16: Competing Ideologies and Post-Diglossia Greek: Analysing the Discourse of Contemporary 'Myth-Breakers' *; 17: Korais and the Second Sophistic: The Hellenistic Novel as Paradigm for a Modern Literary Language