From contact to ‘contamination’ and beyond. What’s left of Calabrian Greek and its speakers in 2020

Maria Olimpia Squillaci

University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’

Minority languages, as noted by Grinevald and Sinha (2016: 27), are often considered “a kind of symbolic package handed down from generation to generation, whose transmission is ideally both whole and accurate, with deviations from these normative ideals (such as those arising from language contact or intergenerational differences in contexts of acquisition and use) being viewed as unfortunate noise in the data”. Such an approach may favour purist attitudes within speakers, who might feel monitored concerning the authenticity of their speech and treated as guinea-pigs (Petropoulou 1997). This in turn instantiates cycles of restriction (Floray 2004) which may eventually bring about language obsolesce, may influence speakers’ speech production, compromising the quality of research outcomes and crucially, can also influence speakers’ language use, leading some to abandon their language altogether (Dohle & Squillaci in prep.). Despite the number of studies on these issues (Craig 1993; Yamada 2007; Fitzgerald & Joshua 2013; Grinevald & Sinha 2016, a.o.), no academic work has so far analysed the effects of such approaches on the Greko community of southern Calabria or indeed on any other Greek/Greek-based dialect. Greko is an extremely endangered Greek variety spoken in southern Calabria, where attempts to revitalise it go back to 1968, when the first Greko language association was founded.

In this presentation, I will therefore (i) analyse current language use within the Greko community, particularly focusing on the intergenerational use of the language between L1 and L2 speakers of Greko. This analysis will shed light on older people’s attitude towards their language, and towards potential learners and new speakers. I will draw on data from the project “Investigating the future of the Greek linguistic minorities of Southern Italy”, part of the Sustaining Minoritized Languages in Europe (SMiLE — Smithsonian Institution) program, for which I acted as principal co-investigator together with Dr Manuela Pellegrino (Pellegrino & Squillaci forth., Pellegrino & Squillaci in prep.). (ii) I will investigate morphosyntactic change in the speech production of younger and older speakers and compare the results with data collected in previous decades (Falcone 1973; Rohlfs 1977; Karanastasis 1984–92; Katsoyannou 1995, a.o.) when the vitality of the language was considerably higher, in order to understand the extent to which Greko has undergone structural changes, and what factors led to them, i.e. language contact, language decay, language internal change. Within this discussion particular attention will be paid to the relatively recent influence of Standard Modern Greek, so as to evaluate its actual interference with Greko.

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