Μια Λεξικολογική Προσέγγιση της Ελληνικής Κοινωνιολέκτου του Στρατού

Abstract

The Greek army has its own sociolect. Its standard form is mainly used by permanent officers a) in official communicational situations, b) in written speech, and c) during the training of new soldiers (Ροφούζου, 2009). In this paper, we focus on the informal form (slang) of the sociolect created by Greek soldiers. This slang is used for daily discussions in a wide variety of situations, allowing soldiers to express humor, personal opinions, and feelings, and to establish their group identity (Καραχάλιου, 2022).

The data for the present study were collected via observation and diary notes, and by conducting informal interviews with the soldiers. More specifically, we offer a lexicological approach to the military slang and shed light on various grammatical aspects, i.e., the morphology, semantics, and pragmatics of the sociolect, in order to present the fundamental features of the slang. We discuss parts of the army vocabulary, which consists of common modern Greek words with different meanings, neologisms, loanwords, acronyms, and truncated words. We record a significant number of lexical collocations, fixed and semi-fixed phrases, and language games, which are widely used in the soldiers’ oral speech. The present sociolinguistic analysis further underlines the fact that the Greek army slang displays linguistic fluidity, heterogeneity, and creativity. These are features that, on the one hand, point out a direct interaction with the language of the youth (Ανδρουτσόπουλος, 2001); on the other hand, they highlight the dynamic nature of language, its adaptability, and its evolution in different social environments.