Arbëreshë

There is a village in Calabria (or in Sicily, Basilicata, Campania, Puglia, Molise) where the priest chants in Greek, the old women speak Albanian, and no one has been to Albania.

At the end of the fifteenth century, after the death of the warlord Scanderbeg, tens of thousands of Albanians crossed the Adriatic and settled in the mountains of southern Italy. Five centuries later their descendants are still there - some fifty towns, from the Pollino massif to western Sicily - and they speak a language that Albania itself no longer speaks: an archaic Tosk, frozen at the moment the ships left, and still spoken today by people who have never crossed the sea.

This book asks the only question that matters about them: how did it last? The answer is not romance. It is the terms of settlement signed before a notary; a Byzantine rite defended for four hundred years without a bishop of their own; colleges petitioned from popes; songs improvised beneath a girl's window; a wedding dress worth as much as a parcel of land; and, at the end, the census figures - the real ones - of towns that are emptying out.

The last chapters do not flinch. In more than thirty towns of the historic Arberia the language is already gone, and no one noticed the year it went. The author, who was born in one of these towns and teaches at the University of Calabria, sets out what the research on endangered languages actually shows, what the Māori language nests did that worked, and what it would take to do the same here - while the last generation of native speakers is still alive to do it.

A five-hundred-year story of maintenance, told without nostalgia: the record of a people who, every two or three generations, had someone do something on purpose so that the story would go on.

Volume One of two. With maps, plates, thematic glossaries, and a gazetteer of the Arbëresh communities of Italy.