Dr Manuela Pellegrino, a fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Harvard University, is one of the youngest and most influential members of the Griko population of Apulia. Griko is the dialect spoken by Griko people in Salento and Grecia Salentina.

In her first ever book, Greek Language, Italian Landscape: Griko and the Re-storying of a Linguistic Minority based on fieldwork she conducted in Grecìa Salentina and in Greece, she shares the outcome of an intellectual and emotional journey into the past and present of Griko, which lasted many years. In it, she showcases how complex the story of Griko is, without romanticising it. One of her aims was to show the interplay of language ideologies and policies promoted by Europe, Italy and Greece contributing to the current revival; highlighting that in the process, Griko itself has become a catalyst for the articulation of multiple local claims, often divergent.

“Griko is to me a language of ‘familiar sounds,’ of my grandmother Lavretàna,” Dr Pellegrino, who was brought up in the Griko town of Zollino, her father’s hometown, tells Neos Kosmos.

“Growing up, I would hear her speaking Griko with my aunties, uncles, neighbours; I was already fascinated by it and I would write down what she’d say – memory and affect play a big role also for me. Griko was ‘around’ me, as a material presence, but it was the language the elderly would speak and, as a child, I thought I had to become ‘old/older’ for it to become ‘mine’ too.”

She argues, however, that the resulting picture of Grecìa Salento/Salento is far from the homogenised one portrayed on global stages and often reproduced rhetorically locally. To her, Griko means different things to different people of different ages and/or backgrounds.

“Griko is a multilayered and internally fractured world. It is embedded in a metalinguistic community, where activists/speakers often debate how to transcribe, update or teach it; they debate what defines Griko’s authenticity, and compete over who can claim authority over the language,” she says.

“These debates turn into a struggle for representation which also hides locals’ fear of losing control over the management of Griko and cultural heritage at large – of seeing Griko being ‘exploited’ rhetorically, and commodified, as in the case of folk music. So, I wish the reader to hear through my words all those sweet and bitter voices that give breath to my book, by sharing their memories of the past of Griko, and their frustrations and hopes for the future of this language and this land.”

In a way her early intuition was right, since she took the conscious decision to learn it only in her late 20s, when she encouraged her parents, her father in particular, to speak it to her.

“To learn Griko I spent a lot of time with elderly neighbors, while delving into its grammar and consulting existing studies,” she explains.

“For me Griko remains the sound of their voices… This is indeed a multilingual environment where locals have long been bilingual Griko/Salentine, even before they learnt Italian.”

The boundaries of the Griko-speaking area itself have been shifting for a long time, so even villages which over time did not retain Griko share the same cultural landscape, she highlights, noting that there is no “Griko town” or village as such, no “Griko identity” detached from the surrounding area.

With her first degree being in foreign languages and literature from the University of Salento, her interest in languages led her to live abroad to study and work.

Speaking Spanish, German and French she decided to pursue a Masters and then PhD in anthropology from UCL. Since 2019 she has been a Fellow at the CHS, Harvard University, focusing on protests against environmental issues in Salento and Northern Greece, particularly interested in forms of activism which privilege art.

“I became an anthropologist because of Griko!” she says. “Anthropology taught me the importance of challenging what is taken for granted. It is illuminating and at times destabilising.”

“It is in fact interesting that Griko attracted the attention of Italian and Greek/foreign philologists and research continues to be mainly linguistic oriented. I rather chose anthropology as the tool to engage critically with Griko, to analyse its past and the social dynamics that claims around the language continue to generate. Here comes the value of ‘participant observation’: spending lengthy periods of time ‘in the field’, among people.”

Dr Pellegrino agrees that the continuation of Griko in Southern Italy is an interesting topic as the discourse about its imminent ‘death’ has been continuous, and alongside it, local scholars’ and activists’ efforts to preserve the language.

“Griko continues to be part of locals’ life in multiple ways; yet people would be disappointed if they were to expect to hear Griko in the streets.”

“If we take languages to be alive only if they are spoken daily, for everything, by the majority of locals, then Griko has long been ‘dead’,” she says, since it has long been and remains the language of a minority within the minority. However, while losing its function as a medium of regular communication, it has acquired a performative aura: it has become a metalanguage and as such it is now more alive than ever.

“But characteristically those who belong to the ‘younger generation’ – from the 1970’s onwards – do not speak Griko; when I started fieldwork ‘my Griko’ consisted of a limited stock of words, sentences and formulaic expressions. Those more sensitive to the topic tend to engage with transmitting cultural practices linked to it. Younger/young people who make the effort to learn/improve it continue to be ‘exceptions’, which accumulate through time and are revealing as such.”

Dr Pellegrino, has for a long time wanted to return to Greece, where she always feels embraced by people’s immediate interest and affection, but Covid got in the way. In Greece, she says, Greeks may get emotional when hearing Griko even though Griko and Modern Greek are not mutually understandable. On the other side, the few Griko locals who attend the language courses offered by the Greek Ministry of Education may practice what they learnt when speaking with Greek tourists/visitors for instance.

“Of course there are common words, but if one makes an effort to overcome pronunciation differences may retrieve the meaning of simple sentences,” she explains, adding that for Greeks with even a rudimentary knowledge of Italian.

“Griko speakers, identify as Italians with a Griko cultural heritage rather than strictly as ‘Griko’ while they do not consider themselves to be ‘ethnically’ different from Salentine-speakers living in nearby villages… Too often speakers are treated as patents and language experts as doctors who prescribe therapies. My contribution was to highlight how locals have been changing their views and uses of Griko interacting with the broader socio-cultural environment and shaping it recursively,” she highlights.

Over the last 150 years, the Griko population has engaged in different forms of activism, in each phase through different modalities and means; yet they never strived or expected Griko to return to be spoken in the day to day. Activists engage today with Griko mainly by writing and/or reciting poems, translating into Griko, performing, discussing it as a metalanguage. Griko’s cultural particularity therefore went and goes beyond its use as a spoken language.

“Today the global attention to language diversity as richness enhances activism and re-shapes its forms, claims and aims,” Dr Pellegrino stresses touching on the Griko and Greko activism she investigated through a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution.

“Through their active support and encouraged by their experience, a brand-new group of young Griko activists has emerged during the lockdown, proposing similar activities for Griko. I’ve adopted them as my nephews/nieces; as an aunt I am inquisitive, supportive/protective – and a bit repetitive, apparently. I shared with them my anthropological analyses, my hopes and fears and I am very proud they recently awarded me a gold medal for maieutic. The world of any minority language is complex: understanding the past of Griko becomes essential to develop the critical skills to participate in its present – to negotiate the recurrent intergenerational power struggles over language belonging, use, and representation.”

While UNESCO has placed Griko and Greko on the endangered list, Dr Pellegrino is critical of the ubiquity of endangerment references to languages.

“In my book I defected attention from the moral panic about the extinction/death of Griko, showing how beyond and in virtue of its endangerment, it has become a cultural resource, producing social relationships, fuelling moral feelings and political interests, ultimately transforming itself and its predicament,” she tells Neos Kosmos.

“I referred to Unesco to highlight the shortcoming of assessing the so-called ‘vitality’ of minority languages and of classifying them without taking into account the historical and extant specificities of each case. Nowadays, the category of ‘linguistic minority’ is overarching. Yet, even for Griko and Greko, beyond the acceptable similarity, different dynamics are at play in the two communities. They are instead confused or often considered as one – more so abroad than in Italy(…)Throughout time local scholars/activists have also looked to Greece for recognition. This dynamic at times gives rise to misunderstanding, as Greeks may see Griko-speakers as Diaspora Greeks. While Griko speakers/locals at large do not define themselves ‘Greek’, they recognise the Greek cultural heritage, again to different extents; they have been further sensitized to it through the availability of School of Modern Greek (SMG) courses funded by Greece since the mid 1990’s, and/or through contacts with Greek visitors/friends et cetera.”

In her book, Dr Pellegrino also highlighted the performative function of poetry in Griko, and its contribution to preserving this language by enriching its material legacy having reached us through poems written by locals throughout time and, at times, are also put into music.

“What’s interesting is that locals consider Griko more apt for poetry and songs; instead they tend to perceive speaking Griko to talk about the present as depriving the language of its ‘dignity’,” she says.

“In order to do so, they tend to use borrowings/adaptations from Salentine or Italian, ‘contaminating’ Griko, the argument goes, to ‘fill in’ the gaps of its vocabulary, which through time came to be restricted to the agricultural world. This opens up debates about the authenticity of Griko and its practices, which extends to the use of SMG – often described as a ‘betrayal’ to the specificities of Griko. These metalinguistic comments reveal aesthetic/moral preoccupations.”

Yet, she goes on, locals keep writing poems, they like reciting them at Griko dedicated events; they increasingly share them on Facebook. Poetry festivals have been organised over the years by local cultural associations. Locals privilege poetry, as opposed to prose, because it is recognised as an authentic practice being longstanding and widespread. Through poetry, moral and aesthetic preoccupations are overcome, as it were.

“I found myself experimenting with Griko words,” she muses, telling me she has been writing poems in the last few years, and more intensively since the outbreak of pandemic.

“I find the language itself inspirational: Griko renders me more creative,” she adds, as she shares her intention to put more focus on Griko, its people, and the social dynamics associated with it, in the future.

“Griko will continue to be the ‘object’ of my anthropological investigation; this is my personal form of activism. One of my current projects is more specifically about ethnographic poetry: composing polyphonic poems in Griko in which I quote my informants– I use poetry as a method of writing ethnographically about the past and present of this language and this land,” she says.

“This reflects the productivity of Griko in its poetic expressions as it emerged through my research and applies it performatively. I have also translated into Griko poetry composed in other minority languages. I am very excited that my passion for Griko, my anthropological training and my artistic drives are flowing into one another. I simply cannot keep them apart.”

Greek Language, Italian Landscape: Griko and the Re-storying of a Linguistic Minority is available at: www.chs.harvard.edu/book/greek-language-italian-landscape-griko-and-the-re-storying-of-a-linguistic-minority/ and for purchase in print via Harvard University Press.

To get a taste of Dr Pellegrino’s poetry and Griko language as it is used today watch the video bellow:

*Billy Cotsis is the author of The Aegean Seven Take Back The Stolen Marbles and the director of the Magna Graecia Greko and Griko documentary series.