Theodoropoulou's study is a welcome addition to the (relatively scant) sociolinguistic literature on major cities in Southern Europe, by contrast with the extensive work carried out, for example, in London, Berlin, and in Scandinavia. The situation in Athens is doubly interesting. On the one hand, there is the significant and little-researched presence of numerous migrant communities, including long-standing ones such as the Albanian or Kenyan, as well as the recent influx of (Syrian, Afghan, or Iraqi) asylum-seekers, some of whom end up in Athens for long periods. On the other hand, Athens reflects deep social and political divisions in Greek society itself, which have been brought to a head by the financial crisis which has engulfed Greece since 2008, perhaps more than any other European state. As Theodoropoulou explains, these precarious financial and social circumstances have led to the rise of the new poor who can be identified alongside the new rich, who have been there for far longer.
In social terms, working-class people who have acquired wealth now live alongside the old bourgeoisie, traditionally implanted in the Northern suburbs of Athens, whereas descendants of the old patrician class are sometimes forced to relocate to the Western suburbs, traditionally the stronghold of a deprived—and often politically radical—working class population. The book focuses on these new amalgams and confrontations from a linguistic perspective. Interview data are complemented by data from popular novels, TV soaps, and hip-hop songs in order to further highlight the newly arising contrasts and mixtures.
The old bourgeoisie is characterized—and accordingly mocked by other groups—by frequent code-switching into English, partly for snobbish reasons and partly because many have been educated abroad in Anglophone contexts and cannot fully express themselves in Greek. The emerging new rich, by contrast, are recognizable from a range of sociolinguistic and stylistic markers, reflecting the ongoing politicised nature of language in Greece, in the endless aftermath of—officially long-abandoned—diglossia.
Theodoropoulou's book includes a long theoretical overview of the recent literature on style and identity in sociolinguistics as well as extensive (translated) extracts from her data to underpin her analysis, the most original part of which is her report on conversations amid her own extended peer-group. Despite the fact that it concentrates on one set of issues within the vast social patchwork of contemporary Athens, the volume will be of interest to sociologists of Southern Europe as well as sociolinguists interested in Modern Greek.
