Modern Greek Dictionaries and the Ideology of Standardization *

Sporadic evidence suggests that the Latin script had already been used in the Early Modern era, notbly for folk poetry or catechism, in Greek areas under Venetian rule or with some other Catholic presence. The articles in Filintas and Zachos-Papazachariou. These early, albeit poorly documented, instances of script change clearly differ from contemporary 'Greeklish' in terms of their political context, social spread and communicative purposes; however, they display a typical feature of digraphia, in that they emerge in a situation of interethnic and intercultural contact. The intercultural and transnational dimension of script choice is also manifest in proposals for Greek orthographic reform in the inter-war era of the twentieth century. Its advocates argued for the simplification of the historical orthography of Greek as a measure against 'the plague of illiteracy', and proposed the adoption of the Latin script in order to avoid confusion between different spellings of the same word in the historical and the proposed phonetic orthography.