Keywords

1 Introduction

Linguistic diversity is often a critical arena for ethnic rivalries, during the course of which states may seek to assert their authority by a strategy of internal homogenisation. The establishment of state power is frequently associated with the process of elevating one particular language to the status of national or official language, which plays a significant role in the forming of a distinct national ideology. The state enjoys the monopoly on language planning,Footnote 1 meaning the adoption of measures on language and education and their implementation through law in a specific territory, on the basis of personal autonomy or non-territorial autonomy. Therefore, the state is also able to intervene decisively in the evolution of minority languages. Language planning measures are partly the result of political and social processes and are often closely associated with a particular claim or demand. Thus the relevant claims and demands are legally invested with a pre-existing linguistic right or tend to crystallise a new legal status. The ‘right’ must, therefore, be perceived as a variable legal concept, the product of multiple and complex factors.

Greek law cannot be considered neutral with regard to religious and language education. It safeguards the Greek Orthodox faith and the Greek language, and as an exception may guarantee minority-language rights, which have evolved since the establishment of the Greek state in 1830. The legal protection of the linguistic identity of non-Greek-speaking Greek citizens consists mainly of the establishment of a special education system. In addition to educational rights, the right to use one’s mother tongue other than the official language in official contact with the state administration was, and still is, guaranteed to a limited extent.Footnote 2

As Greece’s territorial expansion in 1864, 1881, 1913, 1920/1923 and 1947 brought non-Greek-speaking populations within state borders, the attribution ipso jure of Greek citizenship minoritised different linguistic groups, Christians and non-Christians. To reduce minoritisation, Muslims especially were given a certain time period during which they could opt for Ottoman citizenship and leave (in 1881 and 1913).

The assimilatory processes faced by Christians, speakers of languages other than Greek, differed greatly from those faced by Muslims or Jews. Being already half-integrated in the national self-image—owing to their shared religion—Christians found themselves the objects of steady and continuous centripetal homogenising forces: institutional, social and economic. In at least one instance—involving the Slav speakers of Macedonia—the state’s linguistic intervention was direct and enforced (Kostopoulos, 2000). Jews and Muslims, on the other hand, were not targeted through ethno-assimilatory processes. They were regarded as a group that was not susceptible to assimilation into the Greek national self-image, and thus they formed the particular target of a language policy based on an entirely different philosophy and aspirations.

2 The Legacy of the Millet Shapes Language Rights

What makes Greece an interesting case for minority studies, territorial and non-territorial minority status, is the survival of elements of the Ottoman millet systemFootnote 3 that turn religious divisions into political and legal markers. The legal status governing Jews and Muslims in Greece accommodates pre-modern Ottoman elements within the modern schemes that citizenship entails. What I call a ‘neo-millet’ consists of a minority protection system that keeps alive pre-modern legal divisions based on religion and uses them along with modern citizenship. Some of these characteristics have become obsolete with time, such as political representation quotas, community councils and exemptions from military service. Others remain in force under the form of minority rights for the Muslims of Thrace, as is the case with bilingual minority schools, the jurisdiction of muftis on certain family matters and the self-administration of community properties (vakıfs/vakoufia). Jews and Muslims enjoyed a special minority status that evolved gradually after 1830, in 1881, 1913 and 1923 in accordance with Greece’s territorial annexations. With time, and due to the modernisation and democratisation of state structures, communitarian elements have been softened, albeit without losing their main institutional and ideological features (Tsitselikis, 2012). The survival of such institutions is not due to a contemporary trend towards legal pluralism, but is the outcome of a convenient inertia resulting from the antagonism between Greece and Turkey.

Minority protection for Christian non-Greek-speaking populations was granted only to a few exceptional cases (e.g. the Vlachs) and was based on international commitments. By the end of World War II (WWII), and with the new approach to human and minority rights, things changed, but the neo-millet protection framework lived on.

Law and policy in Greece in respect to minority languages are subject to pressure from international European organisations, such as the Council of Europe. The trend towards the adoption of certain provisions of international law concerning minority languages represents a hesitant first step towards freeing Greek policy from narrow and ‘national interest’ orientations. Greece’s signing of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities in 1997 created the opportunity for a new approach to other-language groups. However, in 2022, the Framework Convention is still not ratified by Greece, and neither is the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The Greek government was very reluctant to assist the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages (EBLUL), established by the European Parliament in 1982.Footnote 4 It seems that Greek governments are more than reluctant to adhere to a uniform and multilateral system of control on language policies dealing with linguistic minorities.

3 Language Policy for the Reversed Millet: Jews, Muslims and Armenians

The first generation of minority schools was not subject to a uniform legal framework. One could barely speak about minority schools. These were the religion-based schools of the Jewish communities on Chalkida (1833 to Greece) and the Ionian Islands (1864 to Greece). In these schools Hebrew, although not the language of the community, was taught as a core element of the religious identity of the group. At the end of the 1860s, the Jewish school of Chalkida was seconded by the municipal authorities and the government (Baltsiotis, 2022). In Corfu there was also a Jewish school, and most probably there was one in Zakynthos. The first settled protection of linguistic rights was developed under the Treaty of Constantinople in 1881 when Thessaly and Arta were annexed to Greece and 40,000 Muslims acquired Greek citizenship and special minority rights.Footnote 5 Despite the policy of tolerance, only 2,895 Muslims remained in Thessaly in 1911, on the eve of the massive territorial upheavals experienced in the Balkans and the withdrawal of the Ottoman administration. In Thessaly the Jewish communities also kept their institutional autonomy, including schools.

In 1882 the Greek state allowed the establishment of Jewish and Muslim schools that would be seconded by public financing.Footnote 6 Teaching Greek became obligatory in the Jewish and Muslim schools of the New Territories.Footnote 7 Moreover, in any public school attended by more than 20 Jewish pupils, the Hebrew language and religion would be taught by teachers paid by the state.

The annexation of the New Territories in the wake of the Balkan Wars in 1913 turned a significant number of Muslims and Jews into a minority. The language most widely used among the Muslims was Turkish, although Albanian was also widely spoken in Epirus. A series of provisions arising from the Greek-Turkish Convention of 1913 and the relevant domestic legislation safeguarded the linguistic rights of Muslims. Muslim communities were located in Epirus (Ioannina, Konitsa, Paramythia, Margariti, Preveza, etc.), in Macedonia (Thessaloniki, Kavala, Serres, Drama, Kozani, Veria, Florina, etc.), on a number of Aegean Islands (Lesvos, Chios, Limnos) and on Crete. The Muslim communities of Thessaly (Larisa, Volos, Trikala and Karditsa) retained the institutional organisation they had acquired in 1881.

The expulsion of Muslim populations was conducted officially during the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923. According to the terms of the Convention of Lausanne (January 1923), all Muslim Greek citizens were compelled to leave Greece, with the exception of the Muslims of Thrace (Ladas, 1932). The Albanian-speaking Muslims mainly located in Epirus were also exempt in 1925. The latter were forced to flee Greece by the guerrilla forces of EDES (National Democratic Greek League) in 1944–1945. Until that time the question of teaching Albanian in Epirus was interrelated with religious freedom, and only in a very fragmented way and to a very limited extent with education for various political reasons (Tsitselikis, 2012, p. 439). Thus the Thracian Muslims were and still are the only officially recognised minority with specific linguistic rights, mainly involving the right to be educated in Turkish.

As already stated, the Jewish communities of Greece (scattered among almost all the cities of Macedonia, Epirus, Thrace, the Ionian Islands and Crete) enjoyed institutional autonomyFootnote 8 on the basis of the millet system. Together with community religious institutions, schools became an important field for the promotion of the ethnic identity of each community. The Jews of Greece were split between Greek-speaking (Romaniotes) and Sefarat (Ladino or Judeo-Spanish-speaking) Jews. There were also Italian-speaking and a few Yiddish-speaking Jews. French became a language of the elite for as long as the Alliance Israelite Universelle exerted important cultural-political influence. In 1920 Jewish communities acquired the right to found their own schools.Footnote 9 History, geography, physics and maths were to be taught in Greek, along with the Greek language course, by teachers paid by the Greek state. Each community would decide which other language would be taught in their own schools. In practice, in Thessaloniki, Jewish pupils attended three types of schools: Jewish community schools, schools founded by the Alliance (French-oriented) and a series of private foreign schools (French, Italian, American, German). In the schools run by the community and the Alliance, Judeo-Spanish was also taught, along with Hebrew and Greek.Footnote 10

In Thessaloniki, the most important Jewish centre in Greece, there were 12 community schools in the 1930s teaching Hebrew and Ladino. In Thessaloniki, the Alliance Israelite owned 11 elementary schools teaching in French. There were also schools belonging to the Alliance in other cities. For instance, the Alliance established a school for the local community in Xanthi in 1925 (Koutzakiotis, 2008). There were also elementary community schools in Ioannina, Preveza,Footnote 11 Florina, Komotini and Alexandroupolis. In some cases community schools were merged with public schools, as in Corfu, where Hebrew and Italian were taught.Footnote 12 In other cases, the legal status of the schools changed through time: in Ioannina, for instance, the Jewish school was run by the Alliance until 1915, then it was seconded directly by the Greek government and from 1932 until 1942 it became a Jewish community school (Frezis, 2010). In 1928 there were 83,000 Jewish Greek citizens, 75,477 in 1941 and 10,026 after the Holocaust. Approximately 3,600 emigrated to Palestine or elsewhere in 1945–1950.Footnote 13

In the post-WWII period, Jewish pupils in Athens attended three elementary public schools,Footnote 14 where they received religious education and Hebrew lessons.Footnote 15 It was only in 1960 that the community elementary school was established in Athens, and in 1979 in Thessaloniki. There was one more elementary school, located in Larisa (the 8th elementary school of Larisa), which operated from 1931 until 2017 as a public Jewish school; it closed down because it had a very limited number of pupils.

The Armenian communities, although Christian, were seen as fitting into the millet-like scheme. After all, Armenians in Ottoman times enjoyed millet-like institutional autonomy. Until the 1950s they were considered to be a foreign and enemy element, having close ties to Bulgaria.Footnote 16 In other words, they were seen as a non-autochthonous and non-Orthodox Christian minority that would stay temporarily. Under this percept, Greek authorities were at ease with millet-like minority policies comprising Armenians.

Fourteen elementary schools were teaching the Armenian language before WWII (in Thrace, Thessaloniki, Athens and Piraeus), but only four remained operational after 1947 due to intense emigration to Soviet Armenia.Footnote 17 In 1952 there were 14,500 Armenians in Greece (8,000 of whom were of unidentified citizenship). By the mid-1980s the state authorities supported the Armenian school of Athens by seconding public teachers.Footnote 18 As of 2022 only one elementary school operates in Athens (Blue Cross, Kyanous Stavros).

4 Education Rights for Muslims

The linguistic landscape of Greece in respect to Muslim Greek citizens is mainly the product of the exemption of the Muslims of Thrace from the enforced population exchange of 1923. The main language of the Muslims of Thrace is Turkish, followed by Bulgarian (Pomak) and, to a very limited extent, Romani.

Turkish is used by almost all members of the minority of Thrace, by the ethnic Turks and almost all Pomaks and Gypsies (Roma). Bulgarian (Pomak) is used mainly by the Pomaks of the prefecture of Xanthi and to a lesser extent of the prefectures of Rhodope and Evros. Romani is also used to a limited extent. Outside Thrace, Greek Muslim citizens live in the Dodecanese, mainly in Rhodes and Kos, where there are a very small number of Turkish-speaking communities. Turkish-speaking Muslims, Greek citizens, live in Athens, Thiva, Thessaloniki and elsewhere, as a result of internal migration from Thrace.

As mentioned, the Treaty of Lausanne forms the cornerstone of the system that has, to date, provided special rights for the Muslims of Thrace. Its provisions in respect to language mainly involve the granting of educational rights. To a much lesser extent they provide for the possibility of interpretation into Turkish in court and at polling stations. The decision to use a religious criterion for granting special education rights has strong ideological foundations. The Treaty of Lausanne may attribute linguistic rights on the basis of religion, but it does not rule out the existence or recognition of the linguistic, ethnic or national identity of the members of the minority. After all, the ideological and political circumstances in which the relevant provisions were drafted in 1923 no longer correspond to present-day conditions.

The Treaty of Lausanne, although it does not provide any geographical limitations, has been interpreted in such a way that Muslims outside Thrace cannot enjoy special rights.Footnote 19 From 1947, in Rhodes and Kos, Muslim pupils who attended public schools were granted religious and language courses (in Turkish). In the context of the Greek-Turkish negative reciprocity in the early 1970s, this option was withdrawn.Footnote 20

Moreover, the Treaty does not identify the specific language of the linguistic rights it provides.Footnote 21 However, the relevant educational laws have established that the language of teaching should be Turkish (as well as Greek), which is the mother tongue of most members of the minority, and their lingua franca.

In the minority schools half of the lessons in the timetable are taught in Greek by a teacher who has to be Christian and who is demonstrably a Greek speaker; the other half are taught in Turkish by a Muslim teacher, according to the legal definition. The latter is deemed to be, through religion, Turkish-speaking. There are 103 primary schools for 3,759 pupils where 240 Christian and 299 Muslim teachers are employed (as of 2022) (Office of Minority Schools, 2021). Student numbers have been falling steadily over recent years (from 9,829 in 1990) (Abdurrahman & Huseyinoglu, 2014; Tsitselikis & Mavrommatis, 2019), in line with the overall demographic decline in minority numbers, but also owing to the ever-increasing attendance of public schools by minority students (approximately 1,500 pupils attend public monolingual Greek elementary schools, as of 2022) (Office of Minority Schools, 2021). There are also two middle-high minority schools and another two middle-high schools with a religious orientation (ierospoudastiria). All minority schools are bilingual, in Greek and Turkish, and all are located in Thrace.

One of the major questions was whether Muslims would be entitled to special educational rights. In a case adjudicated by the high administrative court, the ruling was based on consideration of the biological ‘origin’ of the plaintiff. In the case the court ruled that a provision regarding quotasFootnote 22 for entering third-level education was relevant only for Muslims (Greek citizens) descended from those exempted from the population exchange of 1923, such as the Muslim inhabitants of Western Thrace after 1923. In the case, a Muslim of Greek citizenship and resident of Alexandroupolis (Thrace) was denied the right to use this special quota as ‘he was not descended from the Muslims of Thrace’. He was the son of a Greek woman from Thessaloniki who converted to Islam and a Jordanian immigrant.Footnote 23

Greece’s language policy towards the minority in Thrace can be seen as part of its broader treatment of Muslims as a neo-millet, often as an exception to the norm founded on the rule of law. This exception stems from the arrangement in the Treaty of Lausanne, according to which attribution of language rights is related to religious identification within direct territorial limitations. Yet the minority itself also constructs its internal cohesion, structures and ideologies through similar approaches. Thus the fostering of the idea of the community as a millet is reinforced and maintained not only by Greek law but by the minority itself (Tsitselikis, 2012) in a continuing and interdependent relationship.

If language policy in Thrace has evolved slowly in the field of education, there are certain language rights in which it has made absolutely no progress at all. Yet these rights would have compromised what Bourdieu calls the ‘symbolic power’(Bourdieu, 1991, p. 170) of the official Greek language, rather than representing any real burden on the Greek state or local authorities: these rights involve the posting of municipal notices in both languages (the official and the minority language), the adoption of place names in the minority language together with the official language and the possibility of using the minority language in the public’s dealings with the local authority or the public sector (through the distribution of bilingual forms, applications, etc.).

5 Language Policies and Law for Non-Greek-Speaking Christians

All Vlach-, Slav- and Arvanitika (Albanian)-speaking, Greek Orthodox, Greek citizens have been gradually assimilated into Greek-speaking society over three or four generations. In most cases, this language shift has happened through social dynamics, according to which social stigmatisation for non-Greek speakers was the main driver for alignment with the mainstream. In some cases, such as in the 1950s, harsh measures targeted the Slav (Bulgarian/Macedonian) speakers of Macedonia. As a norm, no special measures have been taken for the promotion of these languages, with two exceptions.

The Vlach language was officially recognised with no territorial limitation by a special protocol annexed to the Treaty of Bucharest, which put an end to the Balkan Wars in 1913. The implementation of the religious and educational autonomy of the Vlachs was assigned to the Romanian state. A similar provision attributed special rights for the Vlachs in the Treaty of Sèvres on minorities in Greece (signed in 1920, ratified in 1923). In 1925 there were 23 elementary schools and two middle schools (in Ioannina and Grevena) and one commercial school in Thessaloniki.Footnote 24 Some of these schools had already been established during the Ottoman era; others were established for the implementation of the Greek-Romanian protocol. The parallel operation of Greek and Romanian schools for the Vlachs in numerous villages created tensions and clientelistic relations with political and national effects. In 1940, just before the outbreak of WWII, there were 24 elementary schools (827 pupils), six summer schools (265) and three middle schools (470 pupils). In 1944–1945 only eight Romanian schools were operational (553 students).Footnote 25 Many more Vlachs opted to attend the public Greek schools. The minority Vlach schools closed down as soon as a communist government was established in Romania, and the Greek government was released from her obligations as soon as the Cold War commenced.

The attempt to open schools for Slav-speaking Greek citizens and to introduce their language into education failed in the mid-1920s, after the Greek-Bulgarian population exchange had taken place (Ladas, 1932). In order to comply with her minority obligations according to the Treaty of Sèvres on minorities in Greece (1920/1923), in September 1924 Greece signed an agreement with Bulgaria on reciprocal minorities. The Politis–Kalfoff Protocol was denied by the Greek parliament and faced strong reactions from Serbia within the League of Nations. In 1925 the Greek government published a textbook, the notorious Abecedar, in the Latin alphabet, which was tried in the field as a pilot project and definitively failed. Consequently, the language whose name became a core issue of disagreement for decades (Michailidis, 1999) was left aside unmanaged.

6 Language Policies for Immigrant Communities

In the environment that took shape following the geopolitical upheavals in the period after 1991, Greece has become a destination for immigrants and refugees from the Balkans, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Africa. If religious freedom has been accommodated—though with obstacles—language claims for the establishment of special courses with the assistance of the state are very rare, if not non-existent.

The greatest current challenge in the attempt to secure the coexistence of different language groups is presented by the numerous communities of immigrants, Muslims and Christians who are all foreign speakers. In urban centres linguistic coexistence involves particularly high levels of diversity, owing to the settlement of Muslim immigrants (Tsitselikis & Mavrommatis, 2019).

The increased need for social inclusion has led to the adoption of the intercultural school as a means of managing immigrants’ linguistic alterity. Intercultural education was established by four provisions of Act 2413/1996, which finally failed to regulate linguistic coexistence. Intercultural schools do not seek to provide teaching in the mother tongue of the foreign-speaking pupils, even as a language lesson. Instead they aim at the pupils’ (linguistic) immersion into Greek. However, the law was amendedFootnote 26 in order to allow the teaching of a language other than Greek upon ministerial decision, which to date has not been adopted and therefore not implemented. It seems that concerns other than the ‘best interest of the child’ prevail, which are oriented instead towards making Greek the only language of education, suppressing prospects for mother tongues other than Greek to be taught in state schools.

In only a few cases, sporadically and not sustainably, Albanian communities manage to offer Albanian courses within school premises, in extracurricular time (like in the 132nd elementary school of Athens in 2006). As conceived by the existing legal framework, intercultural schools have no territorial limitations.

Intercultural schools could be compared to the minority schools of Thrace, as far as Muslim non-Greek-speaking pupils are concerned.Footnote 27 The same phenomenon (i.e. Muslim students speaking another language) is tackled in two starkly different but equally ineffectual ways. The distinction between minority and intercultural schools is contradictory, as is the use of the criterion of religion or nationality for inclusion in one or another type of school. It is evident that we need to redefine the objectives of both intercultural and minority schools and to adopt solutions that will meet the linguistic needs of the students above and beyond the formal criteria of religion, nationality or place of residence. The paradox is demonstrated by the example of a Muslim living outside Thrace: as an inhabitant of Thrace they are automatically registered at a minority school, but when they live outside this region they have to join the normal public school and are thus deprived of the right to be taught in their mother tongue. Finally, the approach to other-language immigrants must be based on an initial recognition of their cultural difference. A policy that seeks only to safeguard rights is pointless if not associated with social integration and social benefits, which can and should accrue to other-language immigrants.

7 Conclusions

Linguistic ‘otherness’ is the subject, to a greater or lesser degree, of regulatory measures and political debate and recriminations; it is also a vehicle for political and ideological conflict. What is required is not merely a state of mandatory statutory protection or the suppression of linguistic ‘otherness’. On the contrary, the objective should be the statutory safeguarding of an environment in which linguistic development can continue unhampered, with languages shifting or contracting in use in accordance with social dynamics, in respect to the existence of the ‘other’. In Greece, the management of language otherness has been associated with a stigmatisation of ethnic difference, based on hegemonic terms (Christidis, 1999, p. 173).Footnote 28

Since 1881 and 1913, when Greece significantly increased her territory, minority protection has come under the spotlight of international consideration and guarantees. Over the past 150 years, language rights, among other minority rights, have been either reluctantly granted or ignored. Although minority languages have been treated asymmetrically and incoherently, a pattern seems to have emerged: minority languages spoken by Christians (Vlach, Slavic languages, Arvanitika) have been subject to assimilation dynamics, whereas minority languages spoken by non-Greek speakers of non-Greek Orthodox religion (Muslims, Jews, Armenians) have enjoyed language rights, with or without territorial criteria. This trend was shaped by international political influences and legal regulations through a very narrow perspective that actually screened out any attempt at establishing non-territorial arrangements.

It seems a paradox that in a predominantly Christian country language stigmatisation has targeted Christian non-Greek speakers, rather than non-Christian non-Greek speakers. According to prevailing policies and ideological percepts, the former should be assimilated and the latter should not be assimilated. Territoriality and non-territoriality were used according to the political context as a tool to reduce or control language otherness. The main challenge for the future lies in the area of bridging minority and intercultural education, and the prospect of aligning the relevant legal framework with the provisions of international law already laid down on the European level.

Today, only one minority language enjoys a full set of special rights (mostly in the field of education), namely the Turkish spoken by the Muslims of Thrace. Also, Jewish and Armenian community schools offer language courses to a minimal extent.

On the other hand, migratory flows after 1990—primarily from Albania, the former USSR and the Middle East—have brought up the question of multiculturalism, language contact and language management once again. However, the Greek government is reluctant to introduce special language rights for immigrants and refugees. As Greece refrains from adhering to the main European legal instruments on minority rights, the one and only protection mechanism granting linguistic rights remains the Treaty of Lausanne, although the implementation of the Treaty is today limited to a specific minority language within a specific region. The legal protection of linguistic otherness in Greece was historically fragmented and ambivalent, ranking from absolute invisibility to ΝTA and strict institutional territoriality.