Bilingual English and Greek speakers primarily live in the United States, Australia, Canada, Britain, but also in Greece and Cyprus. English + Greek variants comprise a standard and/or a dialect in the language pair, e.g., General American English and Standard Modern Greek. English + Greek combines typologically different languages with shared and divergent patterns in their segmental inventories, cluster types, phonotactics, syllable structures, and stress. Greek phonology is simpler than English, but its words are longer with more cluster types and carry dynamic stress, in contrast to the predominant monosyllables and complex prosody of English. Few production studies of children’s typical acquisition of English + Greek speech investigate vocabulary, segmental/cluster acquisition, and phonological awareness (e.g., Babatsouli, 2017, 2022c; Geronikou et al., 2022; Papastefanou et al., 2019; Papastergiou & Sanoudaki, 2021), while research on perception is scarce (Georgiou, 2019). There are no assessments, interventions, or research on English + Greek children with speech sound disorders, although the constraints-based and complexity theoretical frameworks are advanced (Babatsouli, 2016a, 2019c), and there is some overlap with SLI (Kambanaros et al. 2017).

Key words:
English, Greek (Standard, Cypriot), multilingual, communication, speech, language, children’s development, interdisciplinary, international communities, assessment, intervention

Book chapter:
Babatsouli, E. (2025). English+Greek speech development. In S. McLeod (Ed.). The Oxford handbook of speech development in languages of the world. Oxford University Press.

Language overview presentation:

• Babatsouli, E. (2024). English+Greek: Multilingual children’s speech development. Charles Sturt University, Australia. https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/languages
• Video: English + Greek [Greek version] – Children’s Speech Development
• Video: English + Greek [English version] – Children’s Speech Development
• PowerPoint: English + Greek [Greek version] – Children’s Speech Development (pdf)
• PowerPoint: English + Greek [English version] – Children’s Speech Development (pdf)

This presentation relates to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:

• SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being
• SDG 4: Quality Education
• SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities
• SDG 17: Partnerships to Achieve the Goals