Dr Georgios Tserdanelis

Telephone: +61 3 9479 6403 Email : g.tserdanelis@latrobe.edu.au Fax: +61 3 9467 3053

Georgios (Yorgos) Tserdanelis joined the RCLT in April 2008 as a postdoctoral research fellow and is now working on a comprehensive typological documentation of the varieties of Greek spoken in contact with English in Australia. According to the 2006 census data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics there are 52,459 persons born in Greece (1st generation immigrants) residing in the city of Melbourne. Of these, about 18,500 claimed to speak English not well or not at all. The systematic description of the internally and externally motivated changes of the Greek spoken by the Melbourne (urban) Greek speaking community, as well as of a sample of smaller semi-urban or rural Greek communities in other parts of Australia, is part of a larger collaborative project, in association with the National Centre of Hellenic Studies and Research, titled:  ‘Speaking Greek in Diaspora: language contact, survival, and maintenance.’

Yorgos received his PhD degree in 2005 from the Ohio State University with a dissertation on segmental sandhi and the prosodic structure of the standard Athenian variety of Greek. Sandhi (from the Sanskrit saṃdhi संधि "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. His thesis supervisors were professors Brian Joseph and Mary Beckman.

Previously, Yorgos was involved in a phonological acquisition study part of the Παιδολόγος (Paidologos) Project (URL: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~edwards/), an investigation of the comparative phonetics of affricates in the Balkan Comparative Phonetics Project (URL: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~gdanelis/BCPP) and in a psycholinguistic study of how speakers adapt to different speaking contexts as a member of the Adaptive Spoken Dialog with Human and Computer Partners Project
(URL: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~adaptation/). He has also taught classes in general linguistics, historical linguistics, Modern Greek, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics at Ohio State, Ohio Wesleyan and at the Cathedral Fellowship Greek Language Program in New York City. As a graduate student he edited (with Wai Yi Peggy Wong) the 9th edition of the popular linguistics textbook ‘Language Files’ (OSU press, 2004). 

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Last Updated: 21 May, 2008 3:29 PM