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Arvanitika

Arvanitika (/ˌɑːrvəˈnɪtɪkə/;[4] Arvanitika: αρbε̰ρίσ̈τ, romanized: arbërisht; Greek: αρβανίτικα, romanized: arvanítika), also known as Arvanitic, is the variety of Albanian traditionally spoken by the Arvanites, a population group in Greece. Arvanitika was brought to southern Greece during the late Middle Ages by Albanian settlers who moved south from their homeland in present-day Albania in several waves. The dialect preserves elements of medieval Albanian, while also being significantly influenced by the Greek language.[5][6] Arvanitika is today endangered, as its speakers have been shifting to the use of Greek and most younger members of the community no longer speak it.[7]

Name

The name Arvanítika and its native equivalent Arbërisht[8] are derived from the ethnonym Arvanites, which in turn comes from the toponym Arbën or Arbër (Greek: Άρβανον), which in the Middle Ages referred to a region in modern Albania.[9] Its native equivalents (Arbërorë, Arbëreshë and others) used to be the self-designation of Albanians in general. In the past Arvanitika had sometimes been described as "Graeco-Albanian" and the like (e.g., Furikis, 1934); although today many Arvanites consider such names offensive, they generally identify nationally and ethnically as Greeks and not Albanians.[10]

Classification

The place of Arvanitika within Albanian

Arvanitika is part of the Tosk dialect group of Albanian, and as such closely related to the varieties spoken across southern Albania. It is also closely related to Arbëresh, the dialect of Albanian in Italy, which largely goes back to Arvanite settlers from Greece. Italian Arbëresh has retained some words borrowed from Greek (for instance haristis 'thank you', from ευχαριστώ; dhrom 'road', from δρόμος; Ne 'yes', from ναι, in certain villages). Italo-Arbëresh and Graeco-Arvanitika have a mutually intelligible vocabulary base, the unintelligible elements of the two dialects stem from the usage of Italian or Greek modernisms in the absence of native ones. While linguistic scholarship unanimously describes Arvanitika as a dialect of Albanian[11] many Arvanites are reported to dislike the use of the name "Albanian" to designate it.[10]

Sociolinguistic work[12] has described Arvanitika within the conceptual framework of "ausbausprachen" and "abstandssprachen".[13] In terms of "abstand" (objective difference of the linguistic systems), linguists' assessment of the degree of mutual intelligibility between Arvanitika and Standard Tosk range from fairly high[14] to only partial (Ethnologue). The Ethnologue also mentions that mutual intelligibility may even be problematic between different subdialects within Arvanitika. Mutual intelligibility between Standard Tosk and Arvanitika is higher than that between the two main dialect groups within Albanian, Tosk and Gheg. See below for a sample text in the three language forms. Trudgill (2004: 5) sums up that "[l]inguistically, there is no doubt that [Arvanitika] is a variety of Albanian".

In terms of "ausbau" (sociolinguistic "upgrading" towards an autonomous standard language), the strongest indicator of autonomy is the existence of a separate writing system, the Greek-based Arvanitic alphabet. A very similar system was formerly in use also by other Tosk Albanian speakers between the 16th and 18th century.[15][16] However, this script is very rarely used in practice today, as Arvanitika is almost exclusively a spoken language confined to the private sphere. There is also some disagreement amongst Arvanites (as with the Aromanians) as to whether the Latin alphabet should be used to write their language.[10] Spoken Arvanitika is internally richly diversified into sub-dialects, and no further standardization towards a common (spoken or written) Standard Arvanitika has taken place. At the same time, Arvanites do not use Standard Albanian as their standard language either, as they are generally not literate in the Latin-based standard Albanian orthography, and are not reported to use spoken-language media in Standard Albanian. In this sense, then, Arvanitika is not functionally subordinated to Standard Albanian as a dachsprache ("roof language"), in the way dialects of a national language within the same country usually are.

Geographic distribution

Regions of Greece with a traditional presence of languages other than Greek. The green areas represent where Arvanitika was/is spoken.
Nineteenth-century ethnic map of Peloponnese. Arvanitika-speaking areas in red.

There are three main groups of Arvanitic settlements in Greece. Most Arvanites live in the south of Greece, across Attica, Boeotia, the Peloponnese and some neighbouring areas and islands. A second, smaller group live in the northwest of Greece, in a zone contiguous with the Albanian-speaking lands proper. A third, outlying group is found in the northeast of Greece, in a few villages in Thrace.

According to some authors, the term "Arvanitika" in its proper sense applies only to the southern group[17] or to the southern and the Thracian groups together[18] i.e. to those dialects that have been separated from the core of Albanian for several centuries. The dialects in the northwest are reported to be more similar to neighbouring Tosk dialects within Albania and to the speech of the former Cham Albanians (Çamërishte), who used to live in the same region.[19] These dialects are classified by Ethnologue as part of core Tosk Albanian, as opposed to "Arvanitika Albanian" in the narrow sense, although Ethnologue notes that the term "Arvanitika" is also often applied indiscriminately to both forms in Greece.[20] In their own language, some groups in the north-west are reported to use the term Shqip (Albanian language) to refer to their own language as well as to that of Albanian nationals, and this has sometimes been interpreted as implying that they are ethnically Albanians.[21]The Arvanitika of southern Greece is richly sub-divided into local dialects. Sasse (1991) distinguishes as many as eleven dialect groups within that area: West Attic, Southeast Attic, Northeast-Attic-Boeotian, West Boeotian, Central Boeotian, Northeast Peloponnesian, Northwest Peloponnesian, South Peloponnesian, West Peloponnesian, Euboean, and Andriote.

Estimated numbers of speakers of Arvanitika vary widely, between 30,000 and 150,000. These figures include "terminal speakers" (Tsitsipis 1998) of the younger generation, who have only acquired an imperfect command of the language and are unlikely to pass it on to future generations. The number of villages with traditional Arvanite populations is estimated to more than 500.[1] There are no monolingual Arvanitika-speakers, as all are today bilingual in Greek. Arvanitika is considered an endangered language due to the large-scale language shift towards Greek in recent decades.[22]

Characteristics

Arvanitika shares many features with the Tosk dialect spoken in Southern Albania. However, it has received a great deal of influence from Greek, mostly related to the vocabulary and the phonological system. At the same time, it is reported to have preserved some conservative features that were lost in mainstream Albanian Tosk. For example, it has preserved certain syllable-initial consonant clusters which have been simplified in Standard Albanian (cf. Arvanitika gljuhë /ˈɡʎuxə/ ('language/tongue'), vs. Standard Albanian gjuhë /ˈɟuhə/).

In recent times, linguists have observed signs of accelerated structural convergence towards Greek and structural simplification of the language, which have been interpreted as signs of "language attrition", i.e. effects of impoverishment leading towards language death.[23]

Writing system

Noctes Pelasgicae, a collection of folk-songs, proverbs and lexical materials in Arbërishte, published by Karl Th. H. Reinhold.

Arvanitika has rarely been written. Reportedly (GHM 1995), it has been written in both the Greek alphabet (often with the addition of the letters b, d, e and j, or diacritics, e.g.[7]) and the Latin alphabet. Orthodox Tosk Albanians also used to write with a similar form of the Greek alphabet (e.g. [8]).

Texts in Arvanitika have survived in the private correspondence between Arvanites who used the dialect. Such is the correspondence of Ioannis Orlandos with Georgios Kountouriotis and other letters by members of the Kountouriotis family written in the Arvanitika of Hydra with Greek script.[24]

In public use, Arvanitika has been used in election pamphlets of Attica and Boeotia in the 19th century. These pamphlets were published in Greek and Arvanitika for the better propagation of party lines among Arvanites and to ease communication between non-Arvanite candidates who could not speak Arvanitika and Arvanite voters.[25]

Language samples

Grammar

Source: Arvanitikos Syndesmos Ellados

Pronouns

Verb paradigms

Comparison with other forms of Albanian

Some common phrases

Source: Arvanitikos Syndesmos Ellados

References

  1. ^ a b Skutsch, Carl (2005). Encyclopedia of the world's minorities. Routledge. p. 138. ISBN 978-1-57958-468-9. Retrieved 3 January 2011.
  2. ^ Arvanitika at Ethnologue (15th ed., 2005) Closed access icon
  3. ^ Arvanitika at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
  4. ^ "Arvanitika". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  5. ^ Μπαλτσιώτης, Λάμπρος (2007). Ταυτότητες και Ετερότητες. Γλωσσική ετερότητα στην Ελλάδα (PDF). Αθήνα: ΥΠΕΠΘ - Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών. pp. 21–23. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 April 2019. Retrieved 16 April 2019.
  6. ^ Dorian, Nancy C., ed. (2001) [1989]. Investigating Obsolescence. Studies in Language Contraction and Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 199-200. ISBN 978-0-521-43757-8.
  7. ^ Babiniotis, Lexicon of the Greek Language
  8. ^ Misspelled as Arberichte in the Ethnologue report, and in some other sources based on that.
  9. ^ Babiniotis 1998
  10. ^ a b c Greek Helsinki Monitor (1995): Report: The Arvanites
  11. ^ E.g. Haebler (1965); Trudgill (1976/77); Sasse (1985, 1991); Breu (1990); Furikis (1934), Babiniotis (1985: 41).
  12. ^ For detailed sociolinguistic studies of Arvanite speech communities, see Trudgill/Tzavaras 1977; Tsitsipis 1981, 1983, 1995, 1998; Banfi 1996, Botsi 2003.
  13. ^ Trudgill 2004 Archived 13 March 2006 at the Wayback Machine, citing the conceptual framework introduced by Kloss (1967).
  14. ^ Trudgill 2004: 5 Archived 13 March 2006 at the Wayback Machine, Botsi 2003
  15. ^ "Albanian-Greek". Archived from the original on 7 October 2017. Retrieved 11 April 2006.
  16. ^ "Albanian language, alphabets and pronunciation". Retrieved 26 March 2017.
  17. ^ Botsi 2003: 21
  18. ^ "Albanian, Arvanitika". Retrieved 26 March 2017.
  19. ^ "Euromosaic-Index1". Retrieved 26 March 2017.
  20. ^ "Albanian, Tosk". Retrieved 26 March 2017.
  21. ^ GHM 1995, quoting Banfi 1994
  22. ^ Salminen (1993) lists it as "seriously endangered" in the Unesco Red Book of Endangered Languages.. See also Sasse (1992) and Tsitsipis (1981).
  23. ^ Trudgill 1976/77; Thomason 2001Archived 27 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine, quoting Sasse 1992
  24. ^ Jochalas, Titos (2020). "Lettere di contenuto velenoso inviate da Londra al Primo Ministro greco scritte nel dialetto albanese di Idra (1824)". Shejzat. 3–4: 69. I testi che seguono sono due "documenti arvanitici", unici nel loro genere, che rispecchiano le cricche e le passioni politiche, che dilaniavano la Grecia subito dopo l'indipendenza nazionale. Si tratta di due lettere che Ioannis Orlandos inviò da Londra, il 20 settembre del 1824 e il 16 marzo dello stesso anno, a Gheorghios Cunduriotis, Presidente dell'Esecutivo del Governo provvisorio del paese...Sembra che la lingua abituale di comunicazione dei Cundurioti anche con il loro cognato fosse l'arvanitica di Idra.
  25. ^ Philippou-Angelou, Petros (1984). "A pre-election speech in the Greek-Albanian dialect of Attica". Proceedings of 1st MNA Meeting: 301.
  26. ^ "Arvanitic". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 13 June 2021.
  27. ^ "Archived copy". www.arvasynel.gr. Archived from the original on 1 January 2007. Retrieved 11 January 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  28. ^ "Archived copy". www.christusrex.org. Archived from the original on 7 October 2017. Retrieved 11 January 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  29. ^ [1][2] Aρbε̰ρίσ̈τ/Arbërísht (Aρβανίτικα/Arvanítika/Arvanitic) (Greece) sample, provided by Wolfram Siegel & Michael Peter Füstumum
  30. ^ [3] Misioni Katolik Shqiptar 'NËNA TEREZE' (Catholic Albanian Mission 'MOTHER TERESA'), Lutje themelore "Ati ynë" (Elementary Prayer: "Lord's prayer")
  31. ^ [4] Misioni Katolik Shqiptar 'BALLINA' (Albanian Catholic Mission 'BALLINA'), Lutjet themelore "Ati ynë" (Elementary Prayer: "Lord's prayer")
  32. ^ [5][6] Arbëreshë/Arbërisht (Italy) sample, provided by Wolfgang Kuhl

Bibliography

External links

Arvanitika test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator