Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

On the Question of the Hellenization of Sicily and Southern Italy During the Middle Ages

1946; Oxford University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1845070

1937-5239

Peter Charanis,

Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition

IN the Middle Ages, at least to the end of the eleventh century, important regions of Sicily and southern Italy, notably the eastern portions of the former and the territories known as Calabria and terra d'Otranto of the latter, were Greek in language. In southern Italy, indeed, Greek survived the Middle Ages, and there are even now, both in Calabria and the terra d'Otranto, a number of communities where Greek is the language of the population.1 When and under what circumstances did Sicily and southern Italy become Greek in language? The earliest answer given to this question was that the prevalence of Greek in Sicily and southern Italy during the Middle Ages was a linguistic survival of Magna Grecia. This view prevailed down to and beyond the middle of the last century when it was challenged by the Italian philologist G. Morosi. Morosi was the first to study systematically and scientifically the Greek in southern Italy in the nineteenth century. He studied both the Greek spoken in terra d'Otranto and that spoken in Calabria. With regard to the former he came to the conclusion that it was the popular idiom of the tenth century, and, accordingly, he placed the origin of the Greek colonies in the terra d'Otranto at the end of the ninth century, during the reign of Basil I or that of Leo VI.2 The origin of the Calabrian colonies, however, he placed later than the ninth century, in the period between the middle of the eleventh century and the end of the twelfth. The reason for this was that in the Greek dialect spoken in Calabria he thought he had found many Arabic and Turkish influences.3 Morosi, therefore, rejected the earlier view which considered the prevalence of Greek in Sicily and southern Italy during the Middle Ages as a linguistic survival of Magna Grecia. The ideas developed by Morosi became generally accepted and remained unchallenged for a considerable time.4 In the meantime, however, the accumulation of archaeological and epigraphical evidence tended to show that the ancient Greek element in Sicily and southern Italy had not been completely