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quarter century, as new worlds have become
established. Language communities that
miraculously prevailed throughout the harsh
and homogenizing years of Albania’s Enver
Hoxha dictatorship are now facing extinction as
Albania forges ahead in its effort to modernize.
Greece’s minority languages are also
facing extinction, as younger speakers of
Arvanitika, Vlach, Pomok, Po-Nash, Romany,
and Tsakonika neglect their languages for the
opportunities mainstream Greek offers.
As an American literary translator, I felt that
Arvanitika, a purely oral language, was outside
my field. Whenever I asked my family about
our oral poetry, village narratives, or songs,
the answer was always that life in the old days
was too hard for such indulgences as gathering
around the hearth to tell tales or sing. Every
minute of the day or night had been a struggle
for survival. Nde més të nátësë shkarísinjëm
dhítë për të klósinjë, edhé i përjërën menate
nde shtrúngë për t’i mjëlëm — “In the middle
of the night we’d take the goats out to graze,
and in the morning we’d bring them back to the
sheepfold to milk them.” Chë kur njóxa vete
hënë time, ngindem me nje kopé dhí — “Since I
can remember, I found myself herding a flock of
goats.”
By the year 2000, there were no fluent
speakers of Arvanitika under seventy left in
our village. There were many deaths in our
family, and during an Easter trip back to Greece
in 2004, I realized that my seventy-five-yearold
uncle was the last fluent speaker I knew.
Should he fall silent, there would only be what
linguists ominously call “terminal speakers”
left, speakers like myself who can understand
what is being said in Arvanitika but were never
expected to be able to carry on a sustained
conversation. I realized that ours was indeed
a vanishing world, and that this was the last
chance to capture as much of its language as
possible.
In Greece, there is no concerted effort to
document and record our language. In the
1990s, the European Bureau of Lesser Used
Languages had sent linguists to our villages for
an initial survey of the state of Arvanitika and
the number of speakers, but they left after they
were attacked with sticks by villagers wary of
outside interest. There have been extremely
valuable linguistic studies of Arvanitika, but
they are mainly specialized books and articles
written by linguists for linguists in German and
English. However, the titles of these works are
unfortunately offensive to our community, as
they identify Arvanitika as at best a marginal
Albanian dialect and at worst as a degenerated
form of Albanian. (The title of the single most
comprehensive and expert linguistic description
actually refers to our language as “Albanian
language remnants.”)
My work as transcriber began with many
hours of one-on-one Arvanitika sessions with
my uncle; passive knowledge of a language,
however deep, usually means that one has little
sense of the structure of the language. One has
to relearn it from the beginning. Punónj, punón,
punón — I till the fields, you till the fields, he
tills the fields. Kam punúare, ke punúare, ka
punúare — I have tilled the fields, you have
tilled the fields, he has tilled the fields.
We discussed things such as greeting rituals.
You don’t just ask Ch’bënëtë — “What’s
up” If you meet an acquaintance from another
village on a mountain path, your greeting must
begin with Si yanë uiñtë — “How are your
olives” Ch’bënëtë stani — “How’s the sheep
pen doing” Si ishtë grurtë — “How’s the
wheat” One might then also ask about the wife
and children.
After weeks of verbs, nouns, adjectives,
and adverbs, my uncle began to describe the
old village life in intricate narratives. I started
making sound recordings with the idea of
setting up an Arvanitika language website
and archive that might serve as a forum for
current and future generations interested in
66 Translation Review