r/casualEurope • u/Movie-Kino • 9d ago

Grecanico: Ancient Greek language still spoken in southern Italy

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20250829-grecanico-the-ancient-greek-language-still-spoken-in-southern-italy
105 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

33

u/GetTheLudes 8d ago

It’s all but gone. It has gotten some support, but that support is hugging it to death.

The support comes from Greece, which is super aggressive in making sure the language is spoken “properly” aka erasing the dialect to replace with standard Greek

3

u/cocoadusted 8d ago

Are they trying to suppress something by being aggressive?

5

u/GetTheLudes 8d ago

No it’s just incompetence and a project led by government and not academia

1

u/lgr142 6d ago

You are disseminating false information

1

u/Trengingigan 6d ago

what is the false information in the video?

1

u/GetTheLudes 6d ago

I’m disseminating information from highly esteemed linguist Ioanna Sitaridou.

Feel free to prove me wrong, I’d be delighted to learn that Grecanico isn’t being replaced entirely by Italian and modern standard Greek.

1

u/lgr142 4d ago

Your “highly”esteemed “ linguist has a political agenda turning into beliefs and not a scientific opinion with merit. The whole of Greece is filled with local idioms of the Greek language that are used and develop freely and Grecanico is not that different in that respect. The severity of what you wrote should have made you more careful in accepting such an extreme viewpoint.

1

u/GetTheLudes 3d ago

I’ve provided an academic source for my claim, can you do the same?

Local idioms in Greece are moribund too. There aren’t any children growing up speaking Tsakoniká

4

u/rusl1 8d ago

I'm from one of the few towns where people still speak grecanico. There are some projects in school to keep it alive but it's spoken mostly by some older people

4

u/Wagagastiz 8d ago

If it's still spoken then it's not ancient.

A language literally can't be living but also unchanging. Some are more conservative than others but only dead languages stay ancient.

15

u/ZgBlues 8d ago

Very pedantic, but also untrue.

“Ancient” here refers to its old origins. A language doesn’t have to be extinct to be ancient.

5

u/Prime624 8d ago

Oh, do some languages today not have old origins?

6

u/me-gustan-los-trenes 8d ago

Not pedantic, just correcting common misconception.

All languages are equally ancient. For example we can trace most European languages to the language spoken on Easter European steppes in prehistoric times. And it's certain that all languages have ancestry much deeper than that, we just lack direct evidence.

The only exception would be newly developed languages like conlangs or creoles, and even for those you can argue that they are rooted in neutral languages as old as humanity.

4

u/Wagagastiz 8d ago edited 8d ago

I didn't say that, nor did it have anything to do with what I'm saying.

Only dead languages STAY ancient. Not only ancient languages are extinct. The latter is obviously untrue.

refers to its old origins

This is completely meaningless. Every spoken language has equally, untraceably old origins. Every variant of still spoken Greek has the same traceable origins as every other Indo European language.

1

u/FlapMyCheeksToFly 8d ago

Couldn't respond under your other comment so I responded under mine;

https://www.reddit.com/r/EverythingScience/s/QsJbbpLOPN