Λες και είχε το αρβανίτικο οστρακιά(!) και το ξορκίσανε…[‘As if Arvanitika was the plague (!) and they exorcised it…’]: Linguistic Attitudes towards the Endangerment of Arvanitika in Greece. A Sociolinguistic Approach
Date Issued
September 28, 2023
Type
Διδακτορική Διατριβή
Abstract
This thesis investigates present-day attitudes of Arvanitika and non-Arvanitika speakers towards the Arvanitika language in Greece. Speakers of Arvanitika in Greece have experienced multiple discriminative, oppressive and assimilation policies on the part of the Greek State in the past, which had led their language to its gradual and long-term decline. For this reason, during the 1980s, experts in linguistics had predicted that Arvanitika would most likely die out within the next two to three generations. However, the Albanian economic migration to Greece in the 1990s seems to have interrupted Arvanitika’s declining trajectory and to have contributed to its short-term ‘revival’ due to its mutual intelligibility with the Albanian language; it was this mutual intelligibility that, during the first years of the Albanian migration, made Arvanitika the basic means of communication among the Arvanitika speakers and the Albanian migrants. This socio-historical dimension that had not been investigated to date was one of the main gaps that this project set out to examine with respect to participants’ attitudes. Data collection took place in person in three Arvanitika-speaking regions in the north and the south of Greece, and online in both Arvanitika and non-Arvanitika-speaking regions throughout the country. The employment of both quantitative and qualitative methods allowed for safe conclusions to be drawn as regards participants’ attitudes towards Arvanitika. The former method revealed positive attitudes on the part of most Arvanitika and non-Arvanitika speakers towards Arvanitika. The latter method revealed conflicting, fluid and contradictory attitudes on the part of the elder in age Arvanitika speakers that were intertwined with participants’ conflicting expressions of their ethno-linguistic identity and their experiencing of profound stigmatisation upon being equated with the Albanian migrants, a population that has been harshly discriminated against in Greece and whose ethnic label bears negative connotations in the Greek context. This equation and its consequent discrimination and stigmatisation against Arvanitika speakers led them to, unconsciously, abandon their heritage language to the point that Arvanitika is now characterised as a(n) (severely) endangered language.
Subjects