Arvanitic language

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{{Infobox Language |name=Arvanitic |nativename=Αρbε̰ρίσ̈τε (Arbëríshte) |pronunciation=[ˌæɾ.bəˈɾiʃ.tɛ] |states=Greece |region=Attica, Boeotia, S Euboea, island of Salamis; Thrace; Arkadia; Athens; Peloponnese; N of island of Andros; 300 villages in total. |speakers=30,000 - 140,000 |familycolor=Indo-European |fam2=Albanian |fam3=Tosk |script=Greek alphabet (Arvanitic variant)
Latin alphabet |iso1=sq|iso2b=alb|iso2t=sqi|iso3=aat}}

Arvanitic or Arvanitika (Greek: Αρβανίτικα; native name: Arbëríshte; spelled Αρbε̰ρίσ̈τε in the Greek-based Arvanitic alphabet) is the variety of Albanian traditionally spoken by the Arvanites, a population group in Greece. Arvanitic is sometimes also described as Graeco-Albanian or similarly,<ref>E.g. Furikis (1934)</ref> although today such designations are considered offensive by many Arvanites themselves, who identify nationally and ethnically as Greeks and not Albanians (GHM 1995). Arvanitic is today an endangered language, as its speakers have been shifting to the use of Greek and most younger members of the community no longer speak it fluently.

Name

Template:Main articles The name "Arvanítika" and its native equivalent Arberishtë<ref>Misspelled as Arberichte in the Ethnologue report, and in some other sources based on that.</ref> are derived from the ethnonym "Arvanites", which in turn comes from the toponym "Arbëna" (Greek: Άρβανα), which in the Middle Ages referred to a region in what is today Albania (Babiniotis 1998). Its native equivalents (Arbërorë, Arbëreshë and others) formerly were the self-designation of Albanians in general. Both "Arbëna" and "Albania/Albanian" go further back to name forms attested since antiquity, and may be ultimately variants of the same root, although this is debated.

Classification

Image:Arvanitic.png

It is generally agreed that Arvanitic, historically, has grown out of the medieval continuum of emerging Albanian dialects, more specifically of the Tosk branch. They were brought to southern Greece during the late Middle Ages by settlers from what is today southern Albania and Epirus. Arvanitic is also closely related to Arbërisht, the diaspora dialects of Albanian in Italy, which also belong to the Tosk group. It is believed that some of the Albanophone settlers in Italy came from the Arvanitic groups in Greece, and therefore Italian Arbërisht has retained some Greek loanwords and other effects of language contact.

There is some disagreement over the present-day status of Arvanitic as a dialect of Albanian or as a separate language. The view of Arvanitic as a separate language is today widely held in Greece, and it is propagated by Arvanitic associations.<ref>E.g. by the Arvanitic League of Greece (Αρβανιτικός Σύνδεσμος Ελλάδος), see [1]</ref> Many Arvanites are reported to find the designation of their language as Albanian offensive, as they feel it implies a denial of their ethnic Greek identity (GHM 1995). The claim to separate-language status is currently reflected in the existence of separate entries for Arvanitic in some international language classification standards. However, these standards still agree in describing it also as a part of "Albanian" as a larger unit.<ref>There is no entry for Arvanitic in parts 1 and 2 of the international ISO 639 standard of language codes, which only has a single entry for Albanian ("alb", "sqi", or "sq"). However, the Ethnologue has a separate sub-entry for "Albanian, Arvanitika" ([2]), along with parallel entries for Gheg Albanian, Tosk Albanian, and (Italian) Arbëreshë ([3]). This is due to the fact that the Ethnologue applies rather less restrictive criteria for separate-language status than most other linguists (cf. Hammarström 2005), treating the existence of "well-established distinct ethnolinguistic identities" in and by itself as a sufficient criterion for separate-language status even in the absence of mutual unintelligibility (Gordon 2005). The current (as of 2006) draft ISO 639-3 standard follows the Ethnologue, listing "Arvanitika Albanian" with the code "aat" ([4]). In the terminology of ISO 639, this implies treatment of Albanian as a "macrolanguage", an intermediate category between a language family on the one hand and a single language with dialects on the other. According to [5] "macrolanguages" are defined as "clusters of closely-related language varieties that [...] can be considered individual languages, yet in certain usage contexts a single language identity for all is needed". This applies in "a transitional socio-linguistic situation in which sub-communities of a single language community are diverging, creating a need for some purposes to recognize distinct languages while, for other purposes, a single common identity is still valid".</ref>

Despite the popular perception of separateness,<ref>For similar cases, cf. the concept of "apperceptional languages" proposed by Strauss (1978)</ref> mainstream linguistic scholarship unanimously describes Arvanitic as a dialect of Albanian. This is true both for international<ref>E.g. Haebler (1965); Trudgill (1976/77); Joseph (1999); Sasse (1985, 1991); Breu (1990).</ref> and for Greek authors.<ref>E.g. Furikis (1934), Babiniotis (1985: 41).</ref> Sociolinguistic work<ref>For detailed sociolinguistic studies of Arvanite speech communities, see Trudgill/Tzavaras 1977; Tsitsipis 1981, 1983, 1995, 1998; Banfi 1996, Botsi 2003.</ref> has described Arvanitic within the conceptual framework of "ausbausprachen" and "abstandssprachen".<ref>Trudgill 2004, citing the conceptual framework introduced by Kloss (1967).</ref> In terms of "abstand" (objective difference of the linguistic systems), linguists' assessment of the degree of mutual intelligibility between Arvanitic and Standard Tosk range from fairly high (Trudgill 2004: 5, Botsi 2003) to only partial (Ethnologue). The Ethnologue also mentions that mutual intelligibility may even be problematic between different subdialects within Arvanitic. Mutual intelligibility between Standard Tosk and Arvanitic 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 [Arvanitic] 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. However, this script is very rarely used in practice, as Arvanitic is almost exclusively a spoken language confined to the private sphere although, it should be noted [6] that Tosk speakers also used a variant of the Greek alphabet extremely similar to the Arvanitic Greek script, and written documents have been written using this script from the 16th until the 18th centuries. There is some disagreement amongst Arvanites (as with the Aromanians) as to whether the Latin alphabet should be used to write their language (GHM 1995). Spoken Arvanitic is internally richly diversified into sub-dialects, and no further standardization towards a common (spoken or written) Standard Arvanitic 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, Arvanitic 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

Template:Seealso 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 "Arvanitic" in its proper sense applies only to the southern group (Botsi 2003: 21) or to the southern and the Thracian groups together (Gordon 2005), 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 Muslim Cham Albanians (Camerija), who used to live in the same region (Euromosaic 1996). These dialects are classified by Ethnologue as part of core "Tosk Albanian", as opposed to "Arvanitic Albanian" in the narrow sense, although Ethnologue notes that the term "Arvanitic" is also often applied indiscriminately to both forms in Greece (Gordon 2005). In their own language, the groups in the north-west are reported to use the term "Shqip" ("Albanian") 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 (GHM 1995, quoting Banfi 1994).

The Arvanitic 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 Arvanitic vary widely, between c.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 Arvanitic populations is estimated to c.300. There are no monolingual Arvanitic-speakers, as all are today bilingual in Greek. Arvanitic is considered an endangered language due to the large-scale language shift towards Greek among the descendants of Arvanitic-speakers in recent decades.<ref>Salminen (1993) lists it as "seriously endangered" in the Unesco Red Book of Endangered Languages. ([7]). See also Sasse (1992) and Tsitsipis (1981).</ref>

Characteristics

Arvanitic 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. Arvanitic gljuhë /Template:IPA/ ('language'), vs. Standard Albanian gjuhë /Template:IPA/). 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 (Trudgill 1976/77; Thomason 2001, quoting Sasse 1992).

Language samples

Grammar

Source: Arvanitikos Syndesmos Ellados

Pronouns

Verb paradigms

Comparison with other forms of Albanian

Some common phrases

Source: 'Arvanitikos Syndesmos Ellados

sv:Arvanitiska