Languages in the Western Balkan Symbiotic Societies: Greek and Albanian in Himara, Albania

Abstract

The paper promotes a hypothesis about a former Greek-Albanian symbiotic society in the krahina Himara in South Albania, where the Greek and Albanian languages and cultures coexisted. It discusses lexicon and spontaneous narratives in the previously uninvestigated Greek dialect of Palasa village, reveals typologically rare and not well-studied non-dominant bilingualism, equal and additional functional distribution of Greek and Albanian, code switching and language hybridisation. Evidence of additional distribution of Greek and Albanian in Palasa was found in the vocabulary of the traditional calendar, narratives, dialogues of the pan-Balkan “The Legend of the Old Lady March” and language for mourning the dead. As for the calendar, the data indicates the consolidation of the Greek language as the primary means of storing the knowledge, its transmission, and communication in the Orthodox Christianity, whereas the Albanian language exhibits a fixed function of disseminating the traditional Balkan folk mythological motifs and official Albanian state calendar. In the narrative of “The Legend of Old Lady March”, which has been told in Greek, the switch into Albanian is indicative when the legendary protagonist insulted the month of March (Dhjefsha buzё marsit! “I wish to defecate in front of March!”). The swearing in Albanian is a direct indication of the first language of the female ancestors of our consultants, who possibly borrowed the whole narrative from Albanian to Greek. Mourning the dead is not a well-studied phenomenon. The women of Palasa, who generally did not speak Albanian, mourned their dead in that language and knew the words “by ear”. The phenomenon of hybridisation (or fusion) is acknowledged on the lexical level in traditional anthroponomastics and with regard to the system of naming months, where we see Albanian month names like Shkurtish, for ‘February’ (instead of a reflex of Greek Φλεβάρης). Still, the functional load is distributed equally according to the general equal communicative competence of speakers in both languages in specific subcategories of the lexical system, e.g. in the names of body parts. Refs 95. Fig. 1. Table 1.