Salentino Dialect, Griko and Regional Italian: Linguistic Diversity of Salento Ekaterina Golovko The University of Bologna, Italy
[email protected],
[email protected] Vladimir Panov1 The Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
[email protected] This paper is a first attempt at presenting the complete linguistic situation of contemporary Salento (Italy), where three different languages are spoken: Italian (in its regional variety), Salentino dialect and Griko. Though it has a limited diffusion in present day Salento, Griko has been widely analysed in literature since dialects of the extreme south of Italy are structurally very divergent from other Italian dialects, supposedly due to the influence of Greek. This paper briefly introduces the Italian linguistic context and the multitude of co-existing varieties and linguistic systems. The main aim of this research is to present the non-standard and minority languages of Salento, and to describe the grammatical systems of the area from a perspective of contact. The authors discuss this major phenomenon in Salentino and Griko and reflect on the origins of the latter. Regional Italian is yet another variety taken into consideration since, as shown in this paper, it presents structural differences from Standard Italian also on a morphosyntactic level. Keywords: Salento; Salentino; Griko; grammatical description; languages contact. 1 Introduction This paper focuses on Salento, an area in the extreme south of Italy characterized by the presence of three language systems: Italian (in its regional variety), Salentino (an Italo-Romance dialect), and Griko (a Greek dialect spoken in eight villages of central Salento). Thus, the language situation in Salento makes it an interesting area to study on both a sociolinguistic and a linguistic level.