THE ARVANITES

General data and the language

Arvanites are those whose mother tongue is Arvanitika (name in Greek )/ Arberichte (name in their language); most linguists use the word Albanian for that language, but the community loathes its use, and it is therefore advisable that this sensitivity be taken into consideration unless researchers and/or human and minority rights activists do not mind alienating the very community they are studying. Likewise, they call themselves Arvanites (in Greek) and Arberor (in their language); but in Northwestern Greece, in their language, they use the term Shqiptar (the same used by Albanians of Albania), a term strongly disliked by the other Arvanites, who also resent being called Albanians.

Nevertheless, Arvanitika belongs to the linguistic family of Albanian, and it has evolved from one of the two linguistic groups of Albanian, the South Albanian Tosk (the other is the North Albanian Gheg). Arvanitika has a dialectical richness: there are three different groups of dialects spoken, one in Thrace, one in Northwestern Greece (near the Albanian border), and one in Central and Southern Greece. The latter, which includes the vast majority of speakers of Arvanitika in Greece, has by itself a great dialectical variety which makes some of these dialects to be, or to be perceived by the speakers as, mutually unintelligible (Nakratzas, 1992:86; Trudgill et al., 1975:44; Tsitsipis, 1983:297; Williams, 1992:85). Along with Vlachs, Macedonians, and Roma, Arvanites in Greece argue whether they should use the Greek or the Latin alphabet to write their language, which has rarely been written (Gerou, 1994a; Kazazis, 1994).