11 Facts About Arvanitika

Arvanitika, known as Arvanitic, is the variety of Albanian traditionally spoken by the Arvanites, a population group in Greece.

Arvanitika is today endangered, as its speakers have been shifting to the use of Greek and most younger members of the community no longer speak it.

Arvanitika was brought to southern Greece during the late Middle Ages by settlers from what is today Albania.

Arvanitika is closely related to Arberesh, the dialect of Albanian in Italy, which largely goes back to Arvanite settlers from Greece.

Italo-Arberesh and Graeco-Arvanitika have a mutually intelligible vocabulary base, the unintelligible elements of the two dialects stem from the usage of Italian or Greek modernisms in the absence of native ones.

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Mutual intelligibility between Standard Tosk and Arvanitika is higher than that between the two main dialect groups within Albanian, Tosk and Gheg.

Trudgill sums up that "[l]inguistically, there is no doubt that [Arvanitika] is a variety of Albanian".

However, this script is very rarely used in practice today, as Arvanitika is almost exclusively a spoken language confined to the private sphere.

Arvanitika is considered an endangered language due to the large-scale language shift towards Greek among the descendants of Arvanitika-speakers in recent decades.

Texts in Arvanitika have survived in the private correspondence between Arvanites who used the dialect.

In public use, Arvanitika has been used in election pamphlets of Attica and Boeotia in the 19th century.