Modern Greek Dictionaries and the Ideology of Standardization

In this paper, we propose an analysis and evaluation of the four most recent and authoritative general monolingual dictionaries of Greek as texts produced by an identifiable agent and addressed to an identifiable public, that contribute to the ideology of standardization. Our claim is that we can demonstrate the profile of each dictionary and uncover the lexicographer’s aspiration to set a pace to the standardization of Greek by looking at and comparing the choices that each of the lexicographers made with regard to aspects involved in the compilation and circulation of their dictionary. The discrepancies observed in the treatment of issues regarding the inclusion/exclusion of words and variants from their list of entries, the labelling of the words, the etymological information provided and the spelling used are explained by the different perspective that each lexicographer assumed in their quest to define the standard language for the Greek linguistic community