Language contact, borrowing and code switching A case study of Australian Greek

The present study is an in-depth investigation of the Greek language spoken by immigrants in Far North Queensland, Australia. The study focuses on contact-induced changes in the language, such as borrowing of lexemes and discourse patterns, and on code switching. The data analyzed derive from participant observation and some 23 hours of audio and video-recorded conversations with first- and second-generation Greek immigrants that were collected during fieldwork in 2013 in Far North Queensland. The study contributes to the investigation of the structure and use of Greek in the diaspora by integrating perspectives from contact linguistics and interactional approaches to code switching.


Introduction
The present study aims to describe and analyze language contact-induced change and code switching in an Australian Greek community in Far North Queensland, Australia. Although language contact has been extensively investigated by linguists (e.g. Aikhenvald 2002;Clyne 2003;Haugen 1953;Matras 2009;Silva-Corvalán 1994;Thomason 2001; Thomason and Kaufman 1988;Tsitsipis 1998;Weinreich [1953] 2011; Winford 2003, among others), to date there are very few in-depth studies of Greek varieties spoken away from Greece or Cyprus: Seaman (1972) on Greek spoken in the US, Tamis (1986) on Greek spoken in Victoria, Australia, and also Dawkins (1916) on Greek dialects spoken in Asia Minor. Partial studies include Tsokalidou (1994) on code switching and gender among second-generation Greeks in Australia, Maniakas (1991) on Greek in Canada, Gardner-Chloros (1992) and Fotiou (2010) on Cypriot Greek in the UK. The present article aims to fill this gap in the literature by reporting the findings of an inductive-focused investigation of the structure and use of Greek spoken in Cairns, Far North Queensland, Australia. More specifically, the study explores the linguistic results of Greek-Australian English contact, with particular attention given to borrowing and code switching phenomena.

1.1
Language contact and change: theoretical preliminaries According to Thomason's (2001, 62) broad definition, language contactinduced change is understood as follows: "any linguistic change that would have been less likely to occur outside a particular contact situation is due at least in part to language contact". Contact-induced changes may be systemaltering or system-preserving (Aikhenvald 2006, 19-20), depending on whether they involve restructuring of the grammatical system or borrowing of a term into an existing system. Three types of contact situations can be identified: language maintenance, language shift, and language creation (Winford 2003). Language maintenance lies at the heart of this study. This type of contact situation occurs when a dominant group is in contact with a linguistic minority, due to immigration, trade, or military invasion. The minority group preserves its native language with contact-induced changes from generation to generation. These changes involve borrowing of forms, constructions or patterns from the language of the dominant group, which carries more power and prestige.
There is no general consensus on the definition of borrowing1 (cf. Winford 2010, 170-172). According to Thomason and Kaufman (1988, 37), borrowing is Journal of Greek Linguistics 18 (2018) 3-44 2 Establishing the context of the study

The Greek-speaking community in Cairns
Australia is a country of linguistic and cultural diversity (Clyne and Kipp 1999, 1). Clyne (2003, 9) describes this diversity as "an open-ended tension between English monolingualism, as a symbol of a British tradition, English monolingualism as a marker of Australia's independent national identity, and multilingualism as a reflection of a social and demographic reality and of an ideology of an independent multicultural and outreaching Australian nation". Greek is one of the many languages spoken in Australia by immigrant populations, and the Greek diaspora is one of the largest in the region. In 1996, Greek was the second most widely used community language spoken in Australia (269,770 speakers) and Melbourne, after Italian (Clyne 2003, 23).
This study targets Greek speakers who live in Cairns, a tropical remote city of Far North Queensland. The first Greeks arrived in Far North Queensland in the late 1890s. They were mostly unskilled or unemployed persons from the Greek islands who worked in the sugar cane industry and on tobacco plantations (see Tamis 2005 for the history of Greeks in Australia). The Greek community in Cairns consists of the children of these first Greeks, and also the Greeks who arrived in Australia after WWII and the Greek civil war, in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. Most of them come from the Greek islands (Rhodos, Kythera, Ithaca, Kasos, Kastelorizo), and some from Macedonia (northern Greece). The Greek community in Cairns is very small; the exact number is unknown. During fieldwork I met about 50 people.
Three groups of speakers were identified.
(i) First-generation Greeks who were born and raised in Greece and arrived in Australia after their adolescence. They are late bilinguals, i.e. they have become bilinguals later than childhood (Li Wei 2000, 5). (ii) Second-generation Greeks who were born in Australia to first-generation Greeks, or born in Greece and arrived in Australia in their preschool years. They are dominant bilinguals, i.e. they have greater proficiency in one of their languages and use it significantly more than the other language, and/or early bilinguals, i.e. they have acquired the two languages early in childhood (Li Wei 2000, 5). (iii) Third-generation Greeks who were born in Australia to second-generation Greeks. Most of them hardly speak any Greek at all.
The contact situation in Cairns is language maintenance for first and secondgeneration Greeks, and language shift for third-generation Greeks. First-generation Greeks form a linguistic minority that became bilingual in the dominant host group, i.e. the English-speaking community, and preserved their native language with minor language contact-induced changes, such as borrowing of lexemes and ways of framing discourse. There are no indications of structural convergence between Greek and English. Greek is spoken at home, in social networks, and at church. Code switching is very common in Australian Greek talk-in-interaction.

2.2
Research methodology From May 2013 to September 2013, I conducted linguistic 'immersion' fieldwork (Dixon 2007) in Cairns. I became a member of the community where the language was spoken, and immersed myself in daily life, and in daily language use. I participated in the religious and cultural activities at the St John Parish of Cairns, and I spent time with my informants in private and public social activities. During fieldwork, I employed basic ethnographic methods (see Eckert 2000 andSaville-Troike 2003 for detailed descriptions of ethnographic methods in linguistics). I established relations of friendship and intellectual partnership with my informants. Data collection was based on audio and a few video recordings of informal face-to-face conversations, and participant observation.
More specifically, I observed who spoke which language and where, how well speakers spoke the languages, and how they utilized each language (see Johnstone 2000, 80-102 for participant observation techniques). Self-reports about when and how speakers use Greek or English, and about language attitudes were also taken into consideration. I used content checking techniques, when I was not sure about the meaning or use of specific loanwords or phrases. Field notes were documented. The aim of fieldwork is to get "real life language data" (Abbi 2001, 1), and conversation is the ideal place to find them. I recorded conversations with 11 first-generation and 9 second-generation Greek immigrants, after I got their consent. I collected about 23 hours of audio-recorded conversations (2 hours were also video-recorded): approximately 16 hours with first-generation Greeks and 7 hours with second-generation Greeks (the corpus contains more than 100,000 words). Conversations took place in arranged meetings, in cultural activities at the St John Parish of Cairns, or during dinners and lunches at the informants' houses, where I was a guest. Informants were invited to share their life stories, or talk about the history of the Greek community in Cairns, but there were no restrictions regarding the topics of conversation. I would often start the conversation by requesting basic biographical information, such as age, year of arrival in Australia, education and occupation.
Journal of Greek Linguistics 18 (2018) 3-44 The structure and use of Greek spoken by immigrants was analyzed following an inductively based method of grammatical analysis in line with Dixon (2010), Aikhenvald (2014), and Aikhenvald and Dixon (2009). According to Dixon (2010, 2), "grammatical structures and rules are worked out inductively, on the basis of the textual corpus, from utterances observed as the community goes about its daily business, and from example sentences gathered during the construction of a lexicon". The inductive analysis of data collected through recorded conversations and participant observation allowed for the generalizations presented in this study (more in §3).
Code switching patterns were analyzed following Auer's (1984; conversation analytic approach to code switching in interaction. Opposite to sociolinguistic and ethnographic approaches to code switching (e.g. Blom and Gumperz 1972;Gal 1979;Myers-Scotton 1993;Rampton 1995) that seek to discover correlations between code switching, fixed meanings, and speakers' social and psychological motivations, interactional or conversation analytic approaches to code switching (e.g. Auer 1984Auer , 1998Li Wei 1994Li Wei and Milroy 1995) define code switching as a locally meaningful linguistic activity/behavior. These studies examine the meaning of individual instances of code switching in conversation, by analyzing where and why code switching occurs, and exploring the procedures through which speakers produce their own behavior and understand and deal with the behavior of others (more in § 4).

Borrowing
Contact-induced change in Greek spoken in Cairns is system preserving, and mainly involves borrowing of lexical items.

3.1
Loanwords Establishing contact-induced change in Greek is easy when it comes to loanwords, as these lexical items "betray their origin directly" (Thomason 2001, 91). The loanwords found are loanblends, which combine native and imported morphemes. These derivational blends comprise an imported English stem plus a native Greek affix, and are adapted in terms of the phonology and morphology of Standard Modern Greek (henceforth SMG). The type of derivational blend found in the data is illustrated with example (1). The loanblend combines the English stem floor and the Greek affix -i, which is inflected for neuter gender, nominative case and singular number. Overall, 31 loanblends were found in the data. All items except one are nouns. This finding aligns with previous studies (e.g. Matras 2007;Moravcsik 1978;Myers-Scotton 2002, 240;Poplack et al. 1988) which report that nouns are among the most frequently borrowed elements in language contact situations.
Twelve of the loanblends are assigned to the same gender as the equivalent term in SMG, illustrated with (1)-(12).
(2) a. to def.n.nom.sg In (23)-(25), it is indeterminate whether the loanword is assigned to the same gender or to a different gender than the equivalent term in SMG.
There is also one adjective borrowed from English that combines the English stem flash, the Greek derivational suffix -ik-and the suffix -o, which is marked for gender, case and number. In (31), the suffix -o is inflected for neuter gender, accusative case and singular number. Similar loanwords are also reported by Seaman (1972, 182-185) and Tamis (1986, 132-137) for the Greek spoken in the US and in Australia respectively. These loanwords adapt the imported stem to Greek phonology. For example, the English stem in the words fláti, flóri, káro, búko, xotéli, bási, and bóksi is adapted in terms of Greek pronunciation. Phonological adaption is also accomplished via omission of final consonant ( yard > yári) and nasalization (wage > ɣuéntza).
Overall, these loanwords are phonologically and morpho-syntactically integrated in the Greek language system, and are used interchangeably with the equivalent SMG terms. In some cases, speakers are aware of the status of these loanwords as borrowed items. For example, certain speakers reported that using these terms in conversations in Greece caused confusion and misunderstanding with other Greek speakers.

3.2
Grammatical treatment of loanwords Although Greek and English are genetically related, they are not structurally similar. Greek is highly inflectional, while English is not. Greek nouns are inflected for gender, case and number. English loanwords in Greek are also assigned to a specific gender, and inflect for number and case. This section focuses on gender assignment to loanwords.
In SMG, the grammatical gender system is divided into three inflectional paradigms or declensions, which correspond to masculine, feminine, and neuter (Triantafyllidis [1941]  All nouns, adjectives, articles, passive participles, and certain pronouns and numerals inflect for masculine, feminine and neuter gender. Gender assignment in nouns denoting humans is sex-based. In general, nouns denoting male humans are grammatically masculine, and nouns denoting female humans are grammatically feminine. Gender assignment in nouns denoting inanimate objects is semantically arbitrary; yet, a few exceptions are found (e.g. nouns denoting countries, islands and cities tend to be grammatically feminine, Anastasiadi-Symeonidi and Chila-Markopoulou 2003, 27). Moreover, in Greek, nouns are assigned to specific genders according to morphological principles (detailed accounts of gender assignment principles can be found in Triantafyllidis [1941Triantafyllidis [ ] 2005Holton, Mackridge and Philippaki-Warburton 1997, 48-72).3 The gender of a loanword is determined either by gender assignment rules in the recipient language, or gender assignment rules in the source language. For instance, Haugen (1953) found that most English borrowings in Norwegian become masculine, but they become feminine or neuter if they are associated with a feminine or neuter morpheme in Norwegian. If they denote a female referent, they become grammatically feminine. The sex of the referent also determines gender assignment to English loanwords in Puerto Rican Spanish in New York City, and to English loanwords in Montreal French (Poplack et al. 1982;Poplack et al. 1988). Gender assignment rules of the source language seem to be dominant in French loanwords in Brussels. Treffers-Daller (1994) showed that words that are masculine or feminine in French remain masculine or feminine when borrowed in Dutch. Stolz (2009) reports similar findings for Italo-Romance loans in Maltese.
Loanwords in Modern Greek and in Greek dialects are assigned to gender according to semantic and morpho-phonological gender assignment rules in Greek. For example, Ralli et al. (2015) found that Romance and Turkish loanwords in Heptanesian and Pontic Modern Greek dialects become feminine if they have female reference, and masculine if they have male reference, whereas loans denoting non-humans tend to become neuter. Moreover, Ralli et al. (2015) showed that the endings that match the Greek ones are reanalyzed as pieces of Greek inflection or as stem-final segments, and through them the integrated nouns are allocated to specific inflectional paradigms. In Modern Greek, referent's sex is an important factor in assigning gender to loanwords (Anastasiadi-Journal of Greek Linguistics 18 (2018) 3-44 Symeonidi 1994; Christofidou 2003). Very often, loanwords denoting inanimate objects become neuter (Anastasiadi-Symeonidi and Chila-Markopoulou 2003, 36).
In Greek-Australian English contact in Cairns, English loanwords are assigned gender according to semantic and morphological gender assignment principles in Greek (cf. Anastasiadi-Symeonidi 1994;Christofidou 2003;Ralli et al. 2015). For example, loanwords denoting male humans are grammatically masculine (e.g. o bόsis 'the male boss'), and loanwords denoting female humans are grammatically feminine (e.g. i bόsena 'the female boss'). The endings of loanwords that match the Greek endings are reanalyzed as pieces of Greek inflection and through them loanwords are allocated to specific declensions. For example, loanwords ending in -a are feminine, and loanwords ending in -o and -i are neuter. Nineteen out of the 27 loanwords referring to the inanimate world are assigned the neuter gender.4 As we will see in § 4.1.2, neuter is also the dominant gender in single word switches.

3.3
Loanshifts The other type of lexical borrowing found in the data is loanshifts. These are pure loan translations or calques, i.e. complex lexical units, either single words or fixed phrasal expressions, which combine native morphemes in imitation of the foreign pattern. Overall, 22 calques were found in the data, marked with bold face in (33) These lexical units copy syntactic and semantic patterns found in English and consist of "an item-by-item translation of the (complex) source unit" (Haspelmath 2009, 39). The calques found in Greek are probably due to frequency, and do not seem to be associated with salient cultural practices or perceived 'gaps' in the Greek language (cf. Aikhenvald 2006, 25). Similar calques are also reported by Seaman (1972, 169-170) for the Greek spoken in the US and by Tamis (1986, 172-178) for the Greek spoken in Australia.

3.4
Diffusion of discourse patterns Diffusion of discourse patterns, such as formulaic greetings or other routinized phrases, has been reported in a number of language contact situations (e.g. Ameka 2006, 138-139;Epps 2006, 285). Indications of diffusion of discourse patterns are also found in Greek-Australian English contact in Cairns, illustrated with (42)-(43).
When a first-generation female Greek called me on my phone and did not reach me, she left the following voice mail. The usual formulation in SMG would have been íme i ʝaʝá tu Peter [cop.1sg.prs def.f.nom.sg grandmother(f).nom.sg def.m.gen.sg Peter], whereby the copula verb marks first person singular, the first person singular pronoun (eɣó) is omitted, and the head is followed by the possessive in the noun phrase. Although the formulation eɣó íme tu Peter i ʝaʝá is grammatically correct in SMG, it is not the default practice for delivering the specific action. Greek is a pro-drop language, i.e. pronouns may be omitted since person is marked in the verb form. When speakers use subject pronouns, they may indicate that something more than referring is being done (cf. Pavlidou 2012). In (42), no extra interactional task is accomplished besides self-reference. Moreover, although SMG allows for both [NP + NP GEN ] and [NP GEN + NP] orders, the second order can be used as a pragmatic strategy to lend focus to the referent introduced by the NP GEN . Such a strategy sounds untypical for (42), whereby identification and recognition of the caller is expected via a recognitional referring expression in initial position that picks out the caller, rather than a third party related to the caller.
Another instance of diffusion is reported by another first-generation female Greek. Once she visited a clothes shop in Greece, and asked the employee for a specific size (43) The employee asked her if she was a foreigner, because her request sounded unusual. It was too indirect and polite for Greek standards. The usual formulation in Greek would have been more direct, for instance via the present indicative interrogative mu ðínete to número ðóðeka? 'Can you give me number twelve?' that expresses immediacy. As Sifianou (1992) has shown, the politeness system in British English is more negative-face oriented, whereas the system in Greek is more positive-face oriented. This cross-cultural difference is reflected in the ways in which the negative-face threatening speech act alvanoudi Journal of Greek Linguistics 18 (2018) 3-44 (Brown and Levinson 1987) of requesting is formulated in the two languages. In Greek, requests are more straightforward, whereas in English requests are more indirect. (43) indicates a similar cross-cultural difference between Greek and Australian English. The female speaker deploys a more elaborate utterance to deliver the request, imitating the English practice, and departs from the more direct formulation, which is expected in Greek. This is why her request is 'noticed' by the Greek employee.

3.5
Interim summary Overall, the contact-induced changes found in the Greek spoken in Cairns, Australia, are system-preserving, and involve lexical borrowings, that consist of loanwords and loanshifts. There are also indications of diffusion of discourse patterns. These borrowings from English are due to intense contact with the English-speaking host community and cultural pressure associated with the prestige of the dominant group (cf. Myers-Scotton 2006, 216-217;Winford 2003, 33-34). Lexical borrowings are found in the speech of both first and secondgeneration Greeks, and across different ages.
English forms make their way into Greek via code switching. Code switching patterns in Australian Greek talk-in-interaction is the topic of the next section.

Code switching in Australian Greek talk-in-interaction
Three patterns of code switching are found in Australian Greek talk-in-interaction: conversational code switching, participant-related code switching, and code mixing (cf. §1.1). In the next sections, I examine code mixing and participant-related switching.

Mixing Greek with English
Mixing Greek with English produces utterances with hybrid structures in which most of the lexicon and morpho-syntax comes from Greek, i.e. the matrix language, and single words or phrases are inserted from English, i.e. the embedded language (cf. Myers-Scotton 1993). Unlike loanwords (cf. § 3.1), single-word switches do not display phonological and morphological adaptation, and are not tokens of established or completed language change. Some of the switches may reflect gradual processes of integration into the Greek language, and thus constitute "regular" switches (Haspelmath 2009, 41).
In code mixing, Greek sets the grammatical frame for mixed constituents: it provides the morpheme order and system morphemes. Content morphemes are incorporated from English into the Greek frame. In code mixed utterances, Journal of Greek Linguistics 18 (2018) 3-44 the number of Greek morphemes usually exceeds that of English morphemes. English content morphemes that appear in code mixed utterances are congruent with their Greek counterparts: they are similar in semantics, categorical status, syntactic and morphological properties, and discourse/pragmatic function. Single or multi-unit insertions consist of adjectives, nouns, noun phrases, verb phrases, adverbs, complement or main clauses, and pragmatic particles. Over 1000 occurrences of momentary insertions of English words and phrases were found in the corpus.

4.1.1
Adjectives English adjectives are usually inserted in copula constructions as copula complements, as is shown in (44) The assignment of feminine gender to nouns denoting days may be due to the fact that in Greek, 6 out of the 7 days of the week are grammatically feminine. The assignment of feminine gender to nouns denoting countries may be motivated by the tendency for Greek nouns denoting countries to be grammatically feminine (cf. Anastasiadi-Symeonidi and Chila-Markopoulou 2003, 27), and the tendency for English nouns denoting countries to be personified as female (cf. Mathiot 1979 Edwards and Gardner-Chloros 2007;Muysken 2000), Light Verb Strategy (cf. Wohlgemuth 2009), or do-construction (cf. Myers-Scotton 2002. In this study, I employ the term Bilingual Compound Verbs (henceforth BCVs). BCVs consist of an embedded language verb (or other lexical item), and a matrix language 'helping' verb meaning 'do/make' or 'be/become' (Muysken 2000, 184-185). The embedded language lexical item carries the semantic information of the complex predicate, while the matrix language auxiliary-like verb bears the inflection and all grammatical functions of the predicate.
In the BCVs in the Greek variety of Cairns, the verbs káno and ʝínome are combined with English verbs or other lexical items (verbs are more common), and create complex predicates, illustrated below: BCVs are enhanced in Greek due to Greek's typological profile. As was mentioned before, Greek is highly inflectional, in contrast to English. Greek light verbs are marked for person, number, tense, aspect and also mood, while English items remain uninflected. Because inserted lexical items are not phonologically or semantically integrated into Greek, they constitute instances of code switching (cf. Muysken 2000;Romaine 1986), rather than instances of borrowing (cf. Wohlgemuth 2009).

4.1.5
Pragmatic markers English pragmatic markers are among the items that Greek immigrants insert into their talk. In (82)-(83),5 speakers employ the English tokens yes and no to respond to another speaker's prior turn. (85) 1 (.) 2 Marilena => Well, ítan ci ecíni kaθiʝités ce o John ítan kaθiʝitís, 'Well, they were also teachers and John was a teacher,' (86) comes from a story telling about Kostantina's arrival in Australia, and the first years of her residence in the country. After a parenthetical sequence that closes in line 3, Kostantina uses and then to continue the telling of the events (line 5). She employs and then/and (line 5, 6, 11) to express time continuity and establish succession between the events narrated (cf. Schiffrin 1987, 128).
(87) 1 Minas => I: anipsçá mu íçe teliósi:: ʝeolóɣos, but ðen borúse na vri <típota> Journal of Greek Linguistics 18 (2018) 3-44 'My niece studied geology, but she couldn't find anything' In (88) and (89), speakers employ so and because to convey meanings of result and cause respectively. So is also used as a marker of transition (cf. Schiffrin 1987, 217) in (90). In line 2, Minas returns to the activity that was interrupted in the preceding lines: he continues presenting photos of Greeks in Cairns. He starts his turn with the particle so to mark transition to the activity. found across first and second-generation Greeks, and across different ages. It is less common in the speech of Greeks who are not highly proficient in English.

4.2
Participant-related switches from Greek to English In general, mixing Greek with English carries no local interactional meaning. However, sometimes, single-word switches may 'tell us something more' about speakers' competences in Greek and in English. Participant-related switches are usually triggered by word searches and lexical retrieval problems. Such switches can occasion sequences incidental to the ongoing sequence structure (Schegloff 2007, 240). Speakers point to the fact that they cannot find the Greek word, they appeal to their co-participant to provide the missing word, and display their incompetence in Greek and higher competence in English. The co-participant offers a translation or an explanation of the requested item.
In (99), Petroula tells a story about how her husband got sick thirty years ago. In line 1, she inserts the English noun tumor. In the next turn constructional unit, the speaker indicates the reason why she inserted a lexical item from English: she does not know the Greek word (ðen kséro stin Eláða 'I don't know [how they call it] in Greece'). In line 2, the researcher provides the missing word in Greek (όgos 'tumor'), and seeks confirmation (íçe όgo sto cefáli? 'did he have a brain tumor?'). Petroula confirms via repetition of prior turn in line 3. The single-word switch in this excerpt indicates speaker's incompetence in retrieving the specific medical term in Greek. The participant-related switches examined above display a number of vocal features that indicate that the speaker cannot immediately locate the appropriate word in Greek. These features are sound stretches (íçe:-, polí:::), cut offs (íçe:-, íne-), pauses, and wh-questions (pos to léne, pos na su po). Goodwin (1983) considers these features to be typical of word searches in interaction. The insertions of English items, which are related to the lexical retrieval problems in Greek, trigger incidental word-search sequences, which are embedded in the ongoing talk. After the speaker inserts the English item and displays his/her incompetence in finding the word in question, s/he initiates the incidental sequence by requesting the correct word. This request may be formulated via a wh-question. The request is the first pair part initiating the wordsearch sequence and projects the relevance of an answer as a second pair part.
The addressee delivers the answer that consists of the correct Greek word the requester is looking for. The requester accepts the answer by repeating the correct word.
Journal of Greek Linguistics 18 (2018) 3-44 In participant-related switches, speakers orient to the 'other language' character of the inserted item, and treat the insertion as 'inappropriate' verbal activity (Auer 1984, 60). These switches reveal speakers' incompetence in Greek, and preference for monolingual talk with the researcher, and may also bring speaker's Australian Greek identity to focused attention in interaction.6

5
What can we conclude?
To sum up, the present study shows that language contact-induced changes in the Greek variety of Cairns, Australia, are minor and system-preserving. These changes involve borrowing of lexical items and discourse patterns. Code mixing is also extensive in Australian Greek talk-in-interaction. Usually, switches from Greek to English carry no local meaning. Yet, sometimes, they are related to speakers' competences in the two languages used.
Overall, the findings reported in this study align with and complement the findings reported by previous studies about Greek-English contact in the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK (cf. Fotiou 2010;Gardner-Chloros 1992;Maniakas 1991;Seaman 1972;Tamis 1986). Moreover, the present study provides evidence for the borrowing of discourse patterns and analyzes code mixing and participant related switching in naturally occurring conversations with Greek immigrants. It contributes to the understanding of contact-induced change in Greek spoken in diaspora, and the patterns of code switching in bilingual conversation (cf. Auer 1984;.

5.1
Factors facilitating language maintenance The main factors facilitating the maintenance of Greek in Cairns concern the "social ecology" (Winford 2003, 26) of the contact situation examined. More specifically, the maintenance of Greek is due to language attitudes and the kinds of contact established within the Greek community, and between the Greek community and the dominant English-speaking community. Clyne and Kipp (1999, 42) argue that "postwar Greek immigrants and their children had an unusually successful history of language maintenance", which is due to "the interrelation of religion, language and a sense of 'belonging' as cultural core values". This insightful description fits well with the contact Journal of Greek Linguistics 18 (2018) 3-44 situation in Cairns. The Greek language has a core cultural value for the continuation of Greeks as a group in Cairns. Language is seen as cultural capital that defines group membership, and contributes to preserving Greek cultural heritage and ethic identity. Moreover, the Greek language has maintained its economic or marketplace value, given that Greeks often worked together with other Greeks.
First-generation Greeks in Cairns have maintained a borderline between an "externally open" and an "internally tightly knit and closed" community (Aikhenvald 2006, 38). They married within their ethnic group, and socialized at the ethnically homogeneous Parish. Most of them maintained closed bonds with relatives and friends in Greece. Greek immigrants often criticize mixed marriages between Greeks and non-Greeks as threatening the maintenance of ethnic identity. Interestingly, there is a coinage that refers to the process of becoming less Greek and similar to foreigners: ksenévo 'become like a foreigner' (root word ksénos 'foreigner' + verb ending -évo '1sg.prs'). Once a firstgeneration female informant made the following derogatory comment about other Greeks who got married with non-Greeks and have cut their bonds from the Greek community: padréftikan me ksénus ce éxune ksenépsi. 'They got married to foreigners and they have become like foreigners.' Sometimes, it was the nature of work in advanced capitalist Australia that did not allow lots of interaction with other non-Greeks, as a first-generation male informant explained to me: Pοlί élines ðen mάθαne eglézika, ʝatί eksartάte pu ðulévis. Άma ίse kάpu pu ðulévis pίso, ðen vlépis kanénan όli méra, ðen milάs me kanénane, kséxasé to.7 'Many Greeks did not learn how to speak English, because it depends on where you work. If you work at the back, you don't see anyone all day, and you don't speak with anyone, forget about it.' For the reasons discussed above, the Greek community in Cairns has been resistant to extensive contact-induced innovations. When the first and second generation of Greeks passes away, language shift is the next stage to follow, given that third-generation Greeks in Cairns have very limited or no grammatical and communicative competence in Greek.

Symbols and combinations of symbols for representing various aspects of speech delivery
punctuation marks indication of intonation, more specifically, .
the period indicates falling/final intonation, ?
the question mark indicates rising intonation, , the comma indicates continuing/non-final intonation. : Colons are used to indicate the prolongation or stretching of the sound just preceding them. The more colons, the longer the stretching. word Underlining is used to indicate some form of emphasis, either by increased loudness or higher pitch.°T he degree sign is used to indicate the onset of talk that is markedly quiet or soft. When the end of such talk does not coincide with the end of a line, then the symbol is used again to mark its end.
-A hyphen after a word or part of a word indicates a cut-off or interruption.

_:
Combinations of underlining and colons are used to indicate intonation contours. If the letter(s) preceding a colon is underlined, then there is prolongation of the sound preceding it and, at the same time, a falling intonation contour. ↓ The down arrow indicates sharp intonation fall. >word< The combination of 'more than' and 'less than' symbols indicates that the talk between them is compressed or rushed. <word> The combination of 'less than' and 'more than' symbols indicates that the talk between them is markedly slowed or drawn out.

.h
If the aspiration is an inhalation, then it is indicated with a period before the letter h.

Other markings
((laughs)) Double parentheses and italics are used to mark meta-linguistic, para-linguistic and non-conversational descriptions of events by the transcriber.