Greek-Romance Contact in Southern Calabria - A Historical Sociolinguistic Approach

The volume is a comprehensive study of the sociolinguistic dynamics that have governed the Greek-Romance contact in southernmost Italy. This study cross-checks the areal distribution of five Greek-style syntactic features that penetrated Romance with the historical documentation from past centuries. It demonstrates that, in Bovesìa, the area where Greek still survives, the Greek-Romance contact occurred very recently, unlike the rest of Calabria. With the support of historical documentation, the study also identifies the figures responsible for the innovation that introduced Romance into Bovesìa and the first adopters who contributed to its spread within a tight-knit social network.