A man talks about the role of his grandmother and grandfather in the study of
the Greek language by his children.
S.P.: And my thought was… “Alright, I’m Greek myself,
but my descendants have to retain something Greek”. That they will retain it
if they become… to be close to the community, the church, the associations,
the language, especially to the language. When they went to school, the
Canadian school, after the second, the second year, immediately because they
had to go to the first grade of the Canadian and afterwards I… I registered
the children in the Greek school, which they completed. My daughter, there was
a junior high school department then, continued in junior high school. They
speak very well the… eh… the Greek language and the… oldest one in particular
writes as well. Now… perhaps now she might have forgotten a little but that
was, for us it was, you have to learn to speak to the grandmother and the
grandfather. In order to be able… and what helped me the most in this, about
the Greek language, was that I had my mother and my father. When we were
leaving, there was my mother and she had some dial… dia… dialect, that is of
the era of 1910, let’s say, when my mother was born and in fact, when my
mother died, the little one was somewhat… she was making things, I guess, she
was calling her ‘tinker’ and she told her at… when she died… she stood up in
her Greek, at the church, she told her “Grandma, I remember you telling me
these” and so on and so on. That is, what do I want to say with this? That
the… our main idea for us, for my family was for the children to learn Greek,
to go to school at least, to retain something of the Greek language, to be
able to communicate and to resume their culture.
