Emergency Language Policy in Greece: Notes From a Decade of Crisis

In mid-November, my colleague Eleni Motsiou and I were invited to present two interrelated papers at the University of Poitiers. Although the audiences and thematic entry points differed —one session focused on multilingual classrooms and the other one made more explicit use of complex systems theory— both presentations revolved around the same question: how does a country respond, linguistically and educationally, when a crisis suddenly renders its existing language policies inadequate?

In this post, I try to bring brings together the main insights from our two talks, with some added reflection on what Greece’s case might mean for language policy, multilingual education, and educational planning more broadly.

What Do We Mean by “Emergency Language Policy”?

Eleni and I use the term Emergency Language Policy (ELP) to describe the rapid, ad hoc, and often improvised decisions that regulate language use and language education during moments of acute disruption.

Our conceptualisation of ELP builds on Bernard Spolsky’s (2004) foundational work on language policy. Spolsky distinguished between three components of language policy: beliefs about language (ideology), language management (i.e., the ways in which a country regulates the use of language) and language practices, which refers to the ways in which language is actually used among people. In our work, we retain the same conceptualisation, but we note that the ways in which language ideology, language management and language practices operate are different in emergency conditions.

I have summarised the differences between mainstream (or “normal”) language policy in the table that follows. But the gist of the table is that former tends to be slow-moving, formalised, and guided by long-term ideological commitments. ELP, in the other hand, emerges when existing policies are suddenly insufficient. It is a form of policy-as-reaction, produced under conditions of pressure and uncertainty.

Component	What this is (Spolsky, 2004)	Normal Policy Context	Emergency Policy Context
Ideology	Attitudes, values, and assumptions about languages and their roles	Stable, often nationalistic & monolingual	Humanitarian, assimilationist, pragmatic
Management	Explicit efforts to influence language use through regulation or planning (laws, curricula, training)	Planned, institutional, consultative	Rapid, improvised, multi-actor
Practices	Actual use of language(s) in a community	Regulated by curriculum and training	Flexible, negotiated, context-driven

The 2015-present refugee situation in Greece created precisely such conditions, and in the paragraphs that follow, I will try to tease out what this destabilisation can tell us about how educational systems respond to crisis.

A Educational System Under Strain

Beginning in 2015, Greece became one of Europe’s primary entry points for people fleeing war and instability in the Middle East and North Africa. More than 850,000 people arrived that year alone. Among them were thousands of children, bringing with them a wide range of linguistic repertoires, fragmented schooling histories, and the psychological impact of displacement.

Setting the scene:
The historicity of the system

The educational system that had to integrate these children had developed over time, under a very different context. It is not that Greek schools had not had learners with diverse backgrounds in the past.¹ However, the education system had been set up to assimilate: in the 1920s, its function was to erase the differences between the newly-annexed regions and ‘old Greece’. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, it reinforced the narratives that people who didn’t speak Greek were foreign: communists, if their language was Slavic; Turks, if they spoke Turkish. Later, in the 1980s, the return of ethnic Greeks from countries outside Greece created new needs for assimilating by teaching Greek, and in the 1990s we were happy to pretend that influx of migrants from the Northern Balkans – predominantly Albanians – were either ethnic Greeks or should be treated as such, in the sense that they had to assimilate.

In other words, Greek schools, deeply shaped by decades of monolingual policy and ideology, were not prepared for the rapid diversification that the 2015 crisis produced. Teachers, who had been trained to either assimilate students by teaching monolingually, or to nudge them out of education if they could not cope with such instruction, were unprepared to deploy multilingual pedagogies. Appropriate materials were scarce, and the assumption often was that students already used Greek as a home language and only needed to develop literacy and instruction in school discourses (what Jim Cummins described as Cognitive and Academic Linguistic Proficiency, or CALP). Some NGO-run non-formal provisions were able to adjust flexibly, by starting from scratch, but the coordination between them and formal schooling was minimal, and there was no-knowledge transfer.

In these conditions, ELP emerged because it had to. It was an imperfect, bottom-up driven, often incoherent response, emerging from the perturbation of the system. It was better than no response at all, but it was hardly a success story.

What Emergency Language Policy looked like in practice

One might summarise the rhe response that emerged from these conditions in three broad moves:

A humanitarian framing

The Ministry of Education, often in collaboration with organisations such as UNICEF, UNHCR, and a range of EU-funded programmes, set up reception classes (ΖΕΠ) and afternoon preparatory structures (ΔΥΕΠ) for refugee and migrant children. These facilities were, in principle at least, designed to provide access to schooling for learners whose arrival disrupted the capacity of the mainstream system. In practice, however, they occupied an ambiguous position: while framed as supportive, specialised, and transitional, but they also introduced new layers of separation between newly arrived children and the Greek school community.

Some of this separation was logistical: different arrival times, different schedules, and (where possible) different buildings. Some of it was pedagogical: the ‘preparatory’ classes where refugee and migrant children found themselves had reduced curricular expectations. And some of it was ideological: the highly-publicised humanitarian narrative (the children’s right to education) balanced with a subtler, less openly disclosed aim: to keep refugee learners at the periphery of school life until they were ready for frictionless assimilation.

Ad hoc pedagogical solutions

In the absence of a clearly articulated curriculum, established pedagogical precedent, or unambiguous ministerial guidance (the kinds of normative frames that typically anchor Greek schooling) teachers across the country were effectively compelled to improvise. What emerged, almost organically, was a patchwork of bricolage practices or locally crafted solutions assembled from whatever resources, experiences, and intuitions educators could mobilise in the moment.

Some teachers repurposed materials designed for other age groups;² others borrowed methods from special education, NGO programmes, or their own professional networks. In several settings, teachers drew on their personal experiences with immigrant learners from earlier years, while in others they pieced together multilingual activities from online repositories, informal collaborations, or their own creative instincts. This improvisational landscape was not a sign of pedagogical negligence but of professional commitment under conditions of uncertainty. Teachers did what teachers always do in times of rupture: they filled the gaps left by the system.

Yet this flexibility existed alongside, and was subtly shaped by, a deeply ingrained monolingual ethos that runs through Greek education. Even where teachers were willing to innovate, their innovations unfolded within established ideological boundaries: Greek as the unquestioned medium of instruction, linguistic diversity as a temporary deviation, and assimilation as the implicit horizon of educational success.³

The result was a paradoxical form of adaptation. Many of the new practices looked innovative, but at a deeper level, the intent and expected outcome of these practices remained firmly aligned with long-standing norms. Multilingual repertoires rarely received validation; the learners’ home languages were seldom treated as resources; and the overarching aim was not to re-imagine the system, but to help students fit into its pre-existing structure as smoothly as possible.

Limited documentation and weak feedback loops

Perhaps the most telling aspect of our review of 165 studies on language policy was not what the research documented, but what it failed to record. Across ten years of publications, several conspicuous absences emerged, which seem to reveal as much about the system’s functioning as the findings themselves.

• To begin with, there was no coordinated needs analysis. Without such baseline information, schools could only respond through local intuition rather than informed planning.
• Similarly absent was systematic monitoring of learner progression. Decisions about expanding, reforming, or phasing out emergency provisions were made in a vacuum, without evidence of what was working and what was not.
• Equally striking was the lack of longitudinal evaluation of programme effectiveness. Were learners transitioning successfully into mainstream classes? Did the structures promote integration, or inadvertently prolong separation? Did the emphasis on Greek-language immersion support or hinder broader educational development? The literature offers no systematic answers.
• Finally, we found little evidence of research feeding back into practice. Although Greek scholars produced a substantial body of work during this period, they seemed to function as observes of ELP rather than participants in shaping it.

Taken together, these absences point to a deeper structural reality. Much of ELP was reactive and compassionate, in the sense that teachers acted with genuine commitment under difficult conditions, but the response lacked intentionality and strategic direction. Without mechanism, memory, or feedback loops, the system operated as a set of parallel, improvised actions rather than a coordinated policy trajectory.

This is precisely the kind of pattern we might expect in a system responding to crisis without a clear theory of change: visible activity at the surface, but limited capacity for learning, adaptation, or transformation at depth.

A Complexity Perspective: Crisis as Perturbation

In one of our presentations, we used Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) to make sense of the process. I often rely on CDST in my work, because it provides intuitive conceptual metaphors that I find useful in thinking about how language education is shaped. I would like to demonstrate this now.

Taking a CDST-informed perspective involves thinking about language policy a system, i.e., an assemblage of actors, practices, rules, resources, possibilities and constraints that collectively shape language use. Systems like this tend to have preferred stable patterns of behaviour, which we call attractors. The Greek language policy system, then has been held together for decades by a strong monolingual attractor. Such attractors are shaped by the historicity of the system, its past states; and they are important in our systems-informed thinking because they resist abrupt change. In fact, complex systems are likely to make small-scale adaptations all the time, in order to remain in their preferred attractor state.

What happened in 2015 was what we might call a perturbation of the system, that is to say, a shock that temporarily destabilised language policy by creating changes that were greater than what the system could absorb. When a system is perturbed, it might respond by reconfiguring itself over time and eventually returning to its old attractor. But perturbations also open up the possibility for creating new structure. If we follow up on the perturbation with some intentional action, we can nudge it towards a new attractor state.⁴ Which of these two trajectories materialises depends on how large the perturbation was and how consistently we keep applying pressure to it.

What our findings suggest that is that Greece’s ELP opened up small spaces for pedagogical novelty, but it seems that the system still remains anchored to its long-standing ideological commitments.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Looking back at ELP in Greece over the past decade, several broader insights emerge. I will try to outline some of them below:

• Improvisation is not innovation: Despite some new programmes, classes, and practices, much of the system’s deeper logic remained unchanged. Improvisation alleviated immediate pressures but seldom translated into structural reform.
• The missing ingredient is purposeful action: Systems do not transform simply because conditions change. They transform when people choose to leverage new affordances towards new goals. Without that intentionality, perturbations produce temporary deviations, not new trajectories.
• Research could play a stronger role, but only if teachers listen: The Greek academic community produced a substantial body of work on refugee and migrant education during this period. However, inconsistent dialogue between research and practice constrained its potential.
• Crisis reveals attractors: If nothing else, the refugee situation illuminated the underlying commitments of Greek language policy: monolingualism, assimilation, and the default marginalisation of multilingual practices. These attractors, while resilient, are neither inevitable nor immutable.

Emergency Language Policy is, by definition, an interim solution. But interim arrangements often become entrenched, or take us back to the attractor space if we do not revisit them critically.

Looking ahead

The Greek case suggests that future crises (whether involving migration, public health, or climate-related displacement) will require policies that are not merely adaptive, but intentional by design. If Greece (and, by extension, other multilingualising societies) are to move beyond emergency thinking and towards more just orders of things, three shifts seem essential:

1. From improvisation to purposeful planning
2. From monolingual ideology to multilingual capability
3. From fragmented efforts to sustained, research-informed policy ecosystems

The crisis of 2015 did not create Greece’s language-in-education challenges, but it revealed them with clarity. And while ELP was a necessary and humane response, it now provides a basis for imagining something more sustainable.

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Footnotes

1. This is, in fact, one of my bugbears: when someone claims that Greece had been a monolingual and monocultural society before refugees arrived. Such claims completely disregard both the rich diversity of Greek societies, and the sustained effort, by the school system, to erase such difference. ↩︎
2. Sometimes successfully, sometimes less so: I once had to fail a student who insisted that the only way she could think of for teaching Greek to adult refugees and migrants involved a book with spelling drills designed for eight-year old monolingual Greeks. ↩︎
3. For more on this, you might want to take a look at this article written by Spiros Moustakas and me, which critically interrogates the content of language textbooks in Greek education. ↩︎
4. The rapid abandonment of audiolingualism and its replacement by the communicative approach in the early 1980s (or 2000s, if you teach in Greece) is a good example of how a system reconfiguring itself, creating structure and settling in a new attractor. ↩︎