Kaliardà (Greek: Καλιαρντά) is a cant developed by LGBT speakers of Modern Greek in Greece.
Usage.
Kaliardà came up first in the beginning of the 20th century in Athens and other urban centers of Greece in order to create a secret language for marginalized LGBT people. According to poet George La Nonce, the language was used as a code to recognize each other and to exclude others, for example in cruising spaces like parks or public toilets. The heights of the use of the language were from the 1940s until the end of the dictatorship in Greece in 1974. With the rise of more visibility and less repression of the LGBT community, Kaliardà has been used less and less.
Elias Petropoulos self-published the first dictionary of Kaliardà in 1971, "Kaliardá: An Etymological Dictionary of Greek Homosexual Slang". Petropoulos was arrested and spent 8 months in prison because of the publication of this dictionary during the military dictatorship.
Trans filmmaker Paola Revenioti made a documentary film about the language in 2018.
Description.
Kaliardà has a dictionary with more than 3000 words. Many words were not invented, but adapted from other languages like Romani, Dortica (a Para-Romani secret language of Greek Roma people) and Turkish, but also Italian, French and English. Words in Kaliardà can be alloys of two or three different languages. The language also plays with foreign affixoids added to Modern Greek words. Onomatopoeias are common in Kaliardà.
According to Petropoulos, the name Kaliardà derives from French "gaillard" ("strong", "sprightly", "lively"). Gordon M. Messing claims it comes from a Romani word for gypsy.