Barile: comunità italo-albanese lucana

Five Arbëresh colonies are included in the varied Lucanian linguistic mosaic. These colonies constitute two distinct alloglot areas, both located in the province of Potenza: Barile, Ginestra, Maschito in the Vulture area, San Costantino Albanese, and San Paolo Albanese in the Pollino area. The Arbëresh language is safeguarded by the National Law No 482/99 on the protection of linguistic minorities. This Law was anticipated by the Regional Law No 40/98 adopted by the Basilicata region. The Albanian communities which inhabit the Pollino preserve the language and the typical Arbëresh customs and habits as well, including the Orthodox rite. These peculiar features are probably due to the geographical position of isolation. Barile, Ginestra, and Maschito, on the other hand, are in daily contact with important neighbouring centres such as Melfi, Venosa, and Rionero in Vulture which are characterised by greater social and cultural prestige and this may have contributed to the progressive loss of the Albanian mother tongue in the Vulturine area. Barile, in particular, is the most exposed centre to contamination processes, both because it is the most populous Arbëresh municipality with about 3000 inhabitants, and because it shares an uninterrupted settlement with Rionero in Vulture. This research has a dual aim: to detect the sense of identity of the community of Barile and register the situation of linguistic interference among the local Arbëresh language, Italian and the adstrate dialects. In this regard, two questionnaires have been prepared: a sociolinguistic one distributed to informants belonging to different age groups, and another linguistic questionnaire distributed to informants over the age of sixty-five. The latter is aimed at collecting kinship and body part nouns. Both are considered among the most conservative semantic fields. The choice of distributing the linguistic questionnaire only to informants over the age of sixty-five is consequent to the result of the sociolinguistic analysis. In fact, only informants over sixty-five have declared to speak Arbëresh as L1.