Greeks in the United Kingdom, Germany and Norway: A comparative study in acculturation and language orientations.
Date Issued
May 20, 2022
Type
Μεταπτυχιακή Διπλωματική Εργασία
Abstract
Day by day, our society becomes more and more culturally diverse. Immigration is a great contributor to this procedure. Throughout history, Greeks were immigrating around the world in search of better living conditions. Germany and the UK have always been common destinations for them. In the last decades though, Norway is getting more and more popular among the Greek immigrants. In this thesis, answers will be given to questions such as what acculturation orientations (integration, assimilation, separation, marginalization) are observed among Greek immigrants living in the United Kingdom, Germany and Norway? What are the Greek immigrants living in the United Kingdom, Germany and Norway main language orientations? Do they maintain their mother language, or is language shift detected? Although immigration policy in Greece is indeed a common research field, to date, there is no relative comparative study for all these countries. This necessity is reflected in the continuous flow of both educated and skilled immigrants to Germany, the UK and Norway in search of a better future. Consequently, this research attempts to contribute to the poorly existing knowledge base within a Greek context and demonstrate the current situation, through the empirical data that will emerge from contact with Greek immigrants living in the target areas. Due to the nature of this thesis, the researcher chose the unstructured interview approach as his research method, in order to obtain some useful qualitative data from the respondents. The results indicated that the immigrants had a different approach towards acculturation and language orientations from country to country. There are both positive and negative attitudes towards the culture of the host or home country, while attitudes towards the maintenance or not of the mother language also vary. The study concludes with some practical implications and recommendations for further research.
Subjects