Plurilingualism in southern Italy: A case study in dynamic language contact

A long tradition in linguistic studies on language contact in the extreme south of Italy has focused on reciprocal contact between Greek and Romance. The direction of such contact has been bidirectional at different stages in the history of Magna Graecia, involving since early times the transfer and extension of Greek structural features into the surrounding Romance varieties and, at least since the 19th century, the adoption of Romance features in Italo-Greek. However, in more recent times Italian, albeit a regional variety, has entered the linguistic repertoire of the traditional Greek- and dialect-speaking communities as a competing spoken code, yet its potential contact effects on these traditional spoken varieties has barely been explored in the literature. By contrast, in this contribution we demonstrate that language contact in Magna Graecia does not only involve the historical dimension of the Greek colonization of southern Italy through which effects of Hellenization and, in turn, Romancization first emerged, but today involves a more complex and dynamic contact situation of trilalìa where the linguistic influence of Italian increasingly plays a significant role in the plurilingual practices of speakers. In this fluid situation of dynamic linguistic contact, where the traditional spoken codes today come into regular contact with regional Italian, novel opportunities for contact-induced change are rife. This article highlights one particularly revealing example where a Balkan-style finite complementation pattern has been blended with an Italian infinitival complementation pattern to produce a hybrid causative structure which integrates superficially finite Balkan-like morphology with an Italian-style syntax.