Although sociolinguistic research on the cinematic and television portrayal of diverse sociolects has been quite satisfactory in the last years, most studies have focused on sociolects as these are formed on the basis of gender, age, or social class of fictional characters. In contrast, to the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of sociolinguistic studies on the mediation of military sociolect in popular culture. Focusing on the analysis of three Greek popular movies depicting the life of soldiers, in the present study, we explore the cinematic representation of the speech styles of soldiers and officers, aiming to shed some light on the imagery constructed for both social groups, and the Greek army in general. The linguistic analysis of the films revealed that a limited number of linguistic features of formal and informal military sociolect appeared in the speech of characters. This means that the creators of the movies did not intend to offer a “realist” representation of the sociolect and did not want that the speech of their characters greatly deviated from the common linguistic sentiment of viewers. The sociolinguistic analysis showed that military sociolect was used in-group by all soldiers, irrelevant of their socio-economic and educational background. This means that military identity was represented as “erasing” all other identities within the army. On the other hand, at semiotic level, in some scenes, soldiers had an appearance against military standards, which reminds viewers that they watch a fictional (and humorous) representation of the army. Finally, at the ideological level, the role of humor as a covert mechanism of social critique emerged. In our case, the target of humor of all three movies was the deconstruction of the army, by highlighting its lack of organization, meritocracy, and flexibility.
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In-Text Citation: (Christou & Stamou, 2013)
To Cite this Article: Christou, S., & Stamou, A. G. (2013). Representations of military sociolect in Greek cinema. Multilingual Academic Journal of Education and Social Sciences, 1(2), 40–58.
Copyright: © 2013 The Author(s)
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