From “Turkish Seeds” to “Greeker than the Greeks”: Navigating authentic Greek identity within the Istanbul Greek community

Authenticity is an often-debated concept within and beyond sociolinguistics, particularly in multilingual contexts. Lacoste et al. (2014) have discussed different modes in which speakers demonstrate and perceive authentic group membership, and Bucholtz & Hall (2005) have asserted that speakers often appeal to broader sociocultural details to legitimize group membership. The Istanbul Greek community then provides an interesting take on group identity as they embody Greek ethnicity with Turkish nationality. This duality for Istanbul Greeks has been a source for Mainland Greeks to historically qualify them as Τουρκόσποροι ‘Turkish seed’ and “less” Greek (Hadodo, 2020).

Due to centuries of geopolitical and sociohistorical developments, Istanbul Greeks and their language have changed absent from Mainland Greek and Cypriot counterparts. Reflecting extended contact with Turkish, French, Ladino, Armenian, and other languages, the Istanbul Greek dialect (IG) reinforces a cosmopolitan identity that opposes a mainstream sense of Greekness (Halstead, 2018; Örs, 2017). In this chapter, I apply stancetaking methodologies to IG-speakers’ metapragmatic discourse to explore how they construct an “authentic” Greek identity by subverting and sometimes inverting dominant mainstream narratives. The IG community therefore showcases how a diverse minoritized indigenous community challenges hegemonic notions of authentic group membership in the stances they take that tie their language use to their own broader lived experiences.