Intercultural aspects of Phanariot and post-Phanariot Greek-Turkish bilingualism

The article, which appears in a special issue of the periodical dedicated to the memory of Peter Mackridge, explores Greek-Turkish bilingualism in Istanbul in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Ottoman Greek community of the so-called "Phanariots" and "Neo-Phanariots". It analyses language use and code-switching between Greek and Turkish, but also Persian, in the framework of multilingualism in the Phanariot manuscript tradition and the printed musical anthologies ("Phanariot songs"). A part of the contribution considers language learning in the nineteenth century as an index of multilingualism, and sheds light on specific aspects of script and elite language in syncretistic writing (Turkish in Greek script).