There was a moment during a talk I recently gave in Astoria––a talk in Greek––when I veered off the script to only encounter a deep linguistic void that would draw me into its vortex, the kind many diasporic people would recognize (and a situation thay would empathize with). I could not come up with the word I needed to say, neither in Greek nor in English.
The legendary cultural reference to this situation has been gloriously captured in the film «Η Θεία από την Αμερική»:
«είμαστε βερι βερι..πως το λέτε εσείς εδώ, γιατί ξεχνάω πώς το λέμε εμείς εκεί, βερι χολοσκασμένες, καμ πληζ πληζ...».
Ι have no sense of how the audience––visitors from Greece and Greek Americans––each received this slip. But in retrospect, in the sound of thundering silence or perhaps awkward mumbling (I cannot remember which) it generated, it inadvertently made the point which was at the core of my talk: extend a call to the research community to explore the diasporic experience in the United States in itself, its histories, biculturalism and bilingualism.
In my case, such an exploration would have revealed a forty-year struggle with two languages, or more accurately two languages in four registers: vernacular English, theoretical English in the humanities, vernacular Greek, theoretical Greek in the humanities.
When I arrived in the United States, I had no grasp whatsoever of the theoretical register of either language (I could handle ok the language of civil engineering in Greek due to my degree on the subject); and only rudimentary skills in vernacular English. The journey of gains and losses while traversing this terrain of deep fault lines has shaped me profoundly––whatever was achieved was with blood, sweat, and tears.
From this angle, the moment of my slippage has nothing to do with failure or embarrassment, but with the revealing of the space where this struggle poignantly announces itself. The fact that it took me perhaps twice as much time to compose the talk in Greek that would have taken a native Greek speaker (and if it were in English, that it would have taken me twice the time than a native English speaker)…
This brings me to a pedagogical, epistemological, and critical issue, exploring the linguistic experiences of the second, the third, and the fourth generation.
Instead of preaching to them about the benefits of learning Greek, we will do good to closely attend to their own feelings, ambivalences, pleasures, hesitations, aspirations, and yes, silences connected with their own bilingual spaces (different age groups will require different strategies in this inquiry). This is to say to cultivate the practice, sensitively and skillfully, of the anthropologist entering into a dialogue with others leading to intersubjective understanding. This is a time and energy consuming approach requiring a great deal of resources. But if we are serious about building/preserving a linguistic community we cannot possibly rely on top-down standardized templates and ideologies removed from the every day realities of the students. The stream of our pedagogies and policies should navigate the linguistic journey through our deep understanding of the youngsters.
Yiorgos Anagnostou
November 11, 2025
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