Name: Arvanitika
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MODEL “BLURB” ON AN ENDANGERED LANGUAGE B. Joseph Linguistics 311 Name: Arvanitika Identifying information: Arvanitika is a member of the Tosk (roughly, Southern) dialect branch of Albanian that is spoken in Greece (and has been spoken in Greece for some 600 years); it is a member of the Albanian branch of the Indo-European language family (and thus part of the family that includes English, Russian, French, Hindi, etc., but a different branch from all of them). Population: the number of possible speakers is reported to be somewhere between 50,000 (based on Newmark’s estimate) and 140,000 (based on the 1977 study of Trudgill and Tzavaras); it is not clear how many are fluent speakers (there are many reports of “semi- speakers” with limited ability in the language). Most (maybe even all) speakers are bilingual in Greek, and most are Greek-dominant. Most moreover are Greek Orthodox and perceive themselves as “Greek”. Where: It is spoken in a band of villages across central Greece into the region around Athens and in parts of the Peloponnesos region of Greece; it thus covers (parts of) Central Greece (e.g. around Lividia and Delphi), Attica, Boeotia, southern Euboea, and the island of Salamis (Salamina). In earlier times, there were many more speakers in islands near Athens and Attica as well. It is now mainly found in rural settings or in small towns. Comments: Arvanitika is closely related to so-called Arbëresh Albanian dialects spoken in Southern Italy and Sicily (somewhat moribund in Southern Italy but relatively robust in parts of Italy, and overall with a more active revitalization movement than Arvanitika). Arvanitika is partially intelligible to speakers of other Tosk dialects but not other dialects of Albanian. There is documentation on the language from the mid-19th century as well as a number of more recent grammatical and ethnolinguistic studies. Arvanitika shows considerable influence from Greek, not only in its vocabulary but in aspects of its structure (phonology as well as syntax) too. There are some movements under way to resuscitate the language, mostly through the creation of relevant written materials, but some such publications are actually in Greek and are aimed more at reminding Arvanites (Greek Albanians) of their Albanian cultural heritage than at revitalizing the language per se. The prospects for survival as a living and functioning language are not good, though the existing grammatical descriptions and collections of texts and such mean that some record of the language will remain. .