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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 29, No. 6: 1015–1032 November 2003

New Albanian immigrants in the old Albaniandiaspora: Piana degli Albanesi

Eda Derhemi

Abstract This paper examines the encounter between ‘new’ Albanian immigrants whoarrived since 1990, and the ‘old’ Albanian diaspora (Arberesh) in a Sicilian town, Pianadegli Albanesi. It demonstrates the complex problems that arise when recent migrantgroups move into communities with similar historical roots but with a long history asa separate socio-historical and cultural unit. The paper is in six parts. In the first, Ibriefly introduce the history of migration into this town and the methodology for datacollection. The second section discusses the concept of diaspora and the ways the differentArberesh and Albanian communities fit this concept; the similarities and differencesbetween the two communities are examined. The third section analyses a survey of agroup of Arberesh and a group of Albanians from Piana regarding their feelings andattitudes towards each other, which shows the existence of social conflict between the twogroups. The fourth section presents the sociolinguistic relations between Arberesh andAlbanians, emphasising patterns of linguistic subordination of the Albanian immigrantsand investigating the motivations of the conflict between the two groups. The fifthsection examines the two communities assessing their diglossic and di-ethnic nature, inorder to better understand their relations and to illuminate prospects for futuredevelopment and co-existence. In the last section I summarise current and historicaldifferences between the two immigrant groups with regard to linguistic and culturalmaintenance.

KEYWORDS: ALBANIAN MIGRANTS; ARBERESH; SICILY; SOCIOLINGUISTICS; DIASPORA;

ETHNICITY

Introduction

In this paper I analyse patterns of subordination regarding the ‘new’ Albanianimmigrants of the last 12 years in the small town of Piana degli Albanesi, Sicily.The analysis is based mainly on field research I carried out in this town in 2001.Piana degli Albanesi (henceforth Piana) is an old Albanian enclave in Sicily thatfor more than 500 years has maintained its language. During the past decade,about 70 Albanians have joined the population of less than 7,000 Arberesh (or‘old’ Albanian) residents of Piana. I refer to the Albanians who have lived inPiana for the past 500 years as ‘Arberesh’ and to the new immigrants who cameto Piana after 1990 as ‘Albanians’. The paper focuses primarily on the linguisticpatterns of subordination, but analyses this process in relation to other ethno-cultural and socio-economic factors that have shaped the identities of bothcommunities, the Arberesh community and that of the recently-arrived Albanianimmigrants. The perceptions of the link between language and ethnicity these

ISSN 1369-183X print/ISSN 1469-9451 online/03/061015-18 2003 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1369183032000171348Carfax Publishing

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two communities have are different from each other and variable in time. Thispaper demonstrates the conditional nature of this link in terms of changinghistorical and social contexts.

The goal of the paper is to demonstrate that the ‘Old Diaspora’ of theArberesh does not necessarily make the life of emigrants of the same ethnicorigin easier, especially when the division in time and space between thecommunities is so great. From the evidence of this case study, I argue, followingDorian (1999: 25), that ethnicity rests fundamentally on social rather than onbiological underpinnings, and that socially constructed categories are subject tochange. In the case of the encounter between Arberesh and Albanians in Piana,both groups perceive the language as a salient expression of ethnicity. But itssymbolic meanings and its relation with ethnicity are constructed very muchaccording to local, historic and contextual circumstances.

As will be shown, Albanians have a weak position in the linguistic hierarchiesin Piana, which derives from their lower economic and social status in relationto the local Arberesh. In this paper I explain the reasons for this low status, theway it is perceived, expressed and reinforced in the new encounter between thetwo groups, and the social reaction and response of both communities to eachother in the context of local and external events and media influence. Asociolinguistic approach will be used, along with the ‘diaspora’ framework andvarious perspectives on ethnicity.

I have had a long and frequent contact with the community of Piana degliAlbanesi. During the 1990s I visited Piana more than 30 times, initially to seefriends and latterly as a researcher into sociolinguistic and ethno-cultural issues.In 2001 I undertook seven months of more concentrated field research, collectingdata on the linguistic features of the Piana Arberesh, and on language use andattitudes amongst the various sectors of the population. Long conversations andinterviews were conducted with approximately 200 people from the town, andI also administered a more focused questionnaire survey, with more than 70questions, to a sample of Piana members, men and women, of all ages, profes-sions and educational levels. This, too, was mainly focused on sociolinguistictopics, including views on Standard Albanian as a way of countering theendangerment of the Arberesh language. The degree of negative responsetowards Standard Albanian was stronger than I expected. This stimulated me toinvestigate the perceived and real conflicts between the long-term residents ofPiana and the recent Albanian immigrants. I began a long set of open-endedinformal interviews with the Albanians and their children; many of the opinionsand assertions in this paper are based on these interviews. I also administereda short (15-question) questionnaire to 30 Albanian migrants who lived in Piana,and part of my analysis is also based on the 26 valid responses I have to thissurvey. This last questionnaire was in Albanian. The interviews with the variousgroups mentioned above were conducted in Italian, Albanian or Arberesh,according to the preference of the person and the topic of the discussion.

Diaspora: Arberesh and Albanians

In his article on diaspora as ‘the past in the present’, Ladislav Zgusta analysesthe meaning of the word in its historical development from its original indo-eu-ropean root ‘sper-’ meaning ‘to sow’, evolving later to the meaning ‘scatter� scattered; disperse � dispersed; people in exile – place in exile; people of a

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certain type living among people of another type’ (Zgusta 2001: 291). Theever-present elements, in every use of the term, were the feeling of separationfrom one’s own community and land, and the sense of something unpleasant.The opposition between ‘exile’ as involuntary and ‘diaspora’ as voluntary, blurswhen it comes to the perception of the community itself about the phenomenon:in both cases the phenomenon is perceived as unpleasant. The dream of the oldplace and community to which the dispersed community once belonged, usuallysurvives for centuries. Although original cultural features are often lost orchanged, the distance in time and space caused the past to become a symbolicicon of longing and pride. In keeping with Zgusta’s definition, a diaspora is notnative to the place where it is settled; it is stationary; it is a minority in relationto its surroundings; and it preserves some original features like ethnicity,culture, religion and language.

The Albanian diaspora in Sicily is relatively old. Piana degli Albanesi is notthe first enclave of Albanians in Sicily, but it is more than 500 years old. Thegroup of Albanians who founded Piana left Albania after the death of Skender-beg, the Albanian hero of the anti-Turk resistance. This was a religiously-moti-vated emigration, since the first Turkish occupation forced the islamisation ofthe Christian Albanian population. After a long stop in Morea, in Greece,1 theyarrived in Sicily in early 1488. In August 1488 the chapters of foundation ofPiana degli Albanesi (also called Piana dei Greci because of its Greek-Byzantinechurch rite) were signed. From that time the compact nucleus of Albanians hasmaintained its language and separate religious rituals for more than 500 years asa minority in Sicily. They call themselves Arberesh, a version of the word‘Albanian’, and the people around them (Sicilian Italians), Leti, a version of theword Latini. The 50 or so Albanians who were added to Piana’s population inthe 1990s are called Albanesi (Albanians) as opposed to Arberesh, live in rentedhomes or apartments in Piana, have temporary humble jobs and in general havea low social status in Piana, although they are perceived as part of thecommunity.

What features of a diaspora does the Piana enclave have? It is not native toSicily; the Arberesh population, language and culture come from outside thezone where they are now settled. The enclave is stationary, the Arberesh havinglived in Piana for centuries, preserving with conservatism some of their originalfeatures and at the same time developing the necessary economic, political andcultural ties with the surroundings. Piana has always been a minority popu-lation, today with a population of 7,000 people at most, a minority language andculture in a Sicilian-Italian environment. But if one perceives Piana as a unit, atown of its own, it is important to note that inside this unit the Arbereshcommunity has always been the overwhelming majority with a strong assimila-tive pressure towards outsiders who married into Piana or decided for otherreasons to live there. Although demographics and the ethnic composition of thepopulation have changed increasingly rapidly in recent decades, inter-ethnicsegregation can still be observed today; Piana has always been a separate unitfrom a linguistic, cultural and religious perspective. The Arberesh have pre-served their culture, religion and language from generation to generation. Theoriginality of these features is surely relative, since there have been manyelements of transference from the Sicilian environment, as I will show later.

How would the recent Albanians of Piana, or other Albanian emigrantsscattered in the world in the post-communist era, fit the above characterisation

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of ‘diaspora’? The Albanians who came to Piana in the last decade, embeddednow in a much older diaspora of the same geographical origin, were not bornin Sicily. The feature ‘stationary’ is not quite appropriate either. From 50Albanians who arrived in Piana in September 1990, there are only three stillliving in Piana. During the intervening years many others have come and gone.Only a few have joined the stable group considered by the Pianioti as ‘albanizte’of Piana. Most are considered a population that does not have roots yet. As forbeing a minority, this is true in all senses, not only with regard to theSicilian-Italian environment, but also with regard to the Arberesh. There is sucha big difference between Piana degli Albanesi and the Albania of today that itwould be naıve for the newcomers from Albania to consider it a communitysimilar to the one they left at home. Today there are about 70 Albanians in Piana,who feel different from the surrounding group and who are considered differentby the majority of Arberesh.

As we will see in more detail later on, the original features that the ‘new’Albanians of Piana still maintain, shrink inexorably. The contacts among themare limited and, when they occur, the pressure of the Arberesh language andculture is ubiquitous. The Albanians who stay for some years in Piana, increas-ingly lose the native accent of their language from Albania. The children, eventhose who now are between 12 and 15 and can still understand Albanian, can nolonger speak it. The younger ones cannot even understand it. The adult, forcedby the needs of everyday life to speak Arberesh, unconsciously continuespeaking to each other in a changed Albanian. It is surprising that the influenceis not just in the vocabulary or in frequent idiomatic expressions of interpersonalcommunication, but in the phonetic features of the language and even in somestructural grammatical characteristics.2

Likewise, the celebrations of the Albanians of Piana are those of the Arberesh.Albanians find in them a way to socialise, dress up, enjoy the music and thefestivities, and let the children have fun. But there are differences between theways in which Albanians and Arberesh participate in these festivities: Albaniansare not very active in them, are not anxious for such festivities to arrive, and donot see the religious meaning in them. The Albanian immigrants did not bringwith them a religious tradition, and the new religious environment did notchange much the atheist attitudes toward religion they learned under thecommunist regime.

Occasionally when a group of Albanians gather and their traditional musicand dancing become factors of solidarity, an awareness of a shared pastengenders happiness in being part of one group. But this group is small, lacksconfidence in its knowledge and possibilities, and has very poor connectionsamong its members. Moreover, it also lacks a strong tradition and concern formaintaining its original features, is still too poor in material terms to care muchfor spiritual and cultural issues, and is without the necessary power to consoli-date its standing in the wider society. Most of its members want to return toAlbania, but have only a very vague idea about when and how they will return.Their desire to return to Albania constitutes more wishful thinking than aserious objective, but thinking about future return hinders them from consider-ing seriously the preservation of their roots and from creating their owncommunity image to face a diverse world. In 26 participants of a survey Iconducted with Piana Albanians, only seven are committed to staying in Italy(more details on this survey in the next section). These seven persons are in fact

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members of only two families. In each of these families one of the members ismarried to an Arberesh, and therefore has a better economic situation and legalstatus in Italy. But even among this group that seems to have decided to stay inPiana, there is a lack of sense of belonging to the majority Arberesh group.

Arberesh and Albanian attitudes in Piana

In this section I present results from two surveys, one conducted with 100Arberesh between 15 and 65 years old, the other with 26 Albanians who live inPiana, aged between 12 and 65 years.

The first survey, with 100 Piana Arberesh, was designed to solicit data onlanguage death, language use and language attitudes in Piana. In order to assesslanguage attitudes in Piana, I needed to investigate the relation of the Arbereshspeakers with Albanians and Albanian language. One of the questions I askedwas ‘What do you think about the Albanians who arrived in Piana during thelast ten years?’ I received 92 answers. Forty-five participants, almost half,expressed themselves very negatively as regards the Albanians. Descriptions like‘all are criminals’,3 ‘women are prostitutes and men support prostitution’, ‘theywant easy earnings’, ‘third-world persons’, ‘ignorant people’, ‘hooligans’, ‘theydemand more than they deserve’, ‘I’d better not answer this one’, ‘very diffident’are the ones I consider as negative opinions.

About 40 per cent of the participants express mixed feelings, including sorrowand pity, about Albanians. Some of them explicitly refer to the negative role ofthe media as the cause of the bad image they have towards Albanians, or claimthat their bad impression does not concern the Albanians they have known.Often the characterisations of this group imply some negative feeling, althoughthe participants try to find ways to justify it, or to express pity for the Albanians.This is not a friendly discourse, but it is not aggressive either. I include in thiscategory characterisations like ‘miserable refugees’, ‘extracomunitari’,4 ‘differentfrom us’, ‘Ah, the poor things’, ‘they are desperate and in search of jobs’, ‘theycome to Italy in order to survive’, ‘there is a lot of bad publicity, so what can wethink … ?’, ‘everybody says they are criminals, but the ones I know are nicepeople’. Often in this category the characterisations imply an attitude of superi-ority of Arberesh towards the Albanians, like: ‘we help the ones who deserveour help’, ‘we must allow them to stay here’, ‘their being in Piana does notbother me very much’.

There is a very small group, just 10 per cent of the participants, who expresssupport for Albanians. In this group most of the support appears as an indirectlypositive stance towards Albanians of the type ‘they have a lot of problems anddifficulties and we need to help them’, or ‘we (Italians or Arberesh) are not allthe same, why should we expect them to be all great?’. Only two participantsgave directly positive characterisations for the Albanian refugees. One calledAlbanians ‘courageous’, and another ‘hard workers’.

Summing up, it is clear that the typical negative descriptive expressions ofItalian newspapers against Albanian immigrants fully matches the characterisa-tions of the Arberesh group with a negative attitude towards Albanians (see Mai2002).

Among the 26 participants, half women and half men, in the survey with theAlbanian immigrants in Piana, four participants were children under 15 yearsold, five were between 15 and 30 years, ten were between 30 and 50 years, and

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seven over 50 years old. Most of the Albanian immigrants in Piana belong to theage group between 30 and 50. They were asked about language use in Piana,about their status in Italy, and about their relations with the Arberesh of Piana.

Irrespective of age, all Albanian immigrants in Piana work or are in continu-ous search for work. All Albanian women in this community, including thosewho did not take part in the survey, work as cleaners or as care assistants forelderly Arberesh, which always implies cleaning as well. Men have a largerrange of working possibilities: some work as carpenters, some as agriculturalworkers, some as itinerant sellers of produce, some as quarrymen and someassist old men who need help.

The survey shows that all the Albanian children under 15 attend Pianaschools, speak fluent Arberesh and Italian and do not use Albanian, althoughsome can still understand it. They feel relatively comfortable at school and intheir relations with other children. Young participants between 15 and 30 stilluse Albanian, but they admit that their Albanian is getting worse, and that it iseasier for them to use Italian since it is the only language used in furthereducation. They consider the Arberesh treatment of Albanians at the level 4–5 ona scale from 1 (very unhospitable) to 10 (very hospitable) but, except for oneparticipant, they see no reason to return to Albania. From five participants inthis group, four attend the University of Palermo. One 27-year-old, who does notattend the university, works as a cleaning woman whenever she can find work.From my contacts with other Albanians in Piana and in Sicily, I have noticedthat those who arrive in Italy after they are about 25 years old do not enrol foreducational programmes but try to find a job; the younger ones considerschooling in Italy as extremely important for their future. From my personalexperiences with Albanian emigrants all over the world, the strong belief thatschooling, and high results at school are very important in the life of theirchildren, are typical of the Albanian immigrants not only in Piana but every-where.5

In the group aged between 30 and 50, the maintenance of the Albanianlanguage is better than in the younger groups, although the general linguisticproblems mentioned above were evident in this group as well. But people of thisage continue to speak Albanian in their homes, with Arberesh interferences at allgrammatical levels. The participants of this age group differ a lot in theiropinions of Piana’s hospitality. Their characterisations range from the lowest tothe highest level. Nevertheless, all underline that the only reason they stay inPiana is economic; otherwise they do not feel happy in Piana. The responses ofthe few participants of the age group over 50 were very similar to the 30–50group.

The following are ten generalisations that can be made from this survey, andfrom my more general field observations in Piana.

• All Albanians, whether they had a university education or only attendedelementary school, do the same types of job in Piana. The higher educationreceived in Albania is of no use in Piana.

• With few exceptions, all the Albanians have jobs of a lower or much lowerstatus than the ones they had in Albania. All the relatively young men witha university education in Piana do jobs that they would have consideredinappropriate in Albania. However, Albanian men over 50 with universityeducation do not work in Piana; instead they have been searching for years for

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more ‘dignified jobs’. On the other hand, all women without exception,irrespective of age or level of education, have accepted humble jobs, mainlycleaning.

• Albanians under 25 feel comfortable in Piana, although they are aware ofsome hostility towards them. Many young Albanians attend university inItaly, or plan to do so. Most of them want to stay in Italy.

• In general people from Tirana want to return to Albania, while the ones whocome from villages are not optimistic about returning.6 In the Albanianfamilies, men tend to want to stay in Piana, while women tend to want toreturn to Albania.

• All parents with young or very young children consider coming to Italy asacrifice. They claim, as the main reason for emigrating, the hope that theirchildren will have a better life. The parents whose children are adult andindependent claim that they came to Italy to help their children by taking careof the grandchildren, or because they could not stay alone in Albania, awayfrom their children.

• In general, the incomes of Albanian immigrants are very modest and their jobsvery insecure; unlike Italians, they have neither official help nor familyproperty to support them during times of financial hardship. This is onereason why their economic status in the new society is so low.

• The illegal or legal status of the immigrants in Piana does not show anyrelevance in the results of the survey.

• The Albanian language of the immigrants in Piana is undergoing changeunder the influence of Arberesh more than of Italian. In general, olderrespondents, participants with a higher education and with more contactswith written Albanian, tend to preserve better the language and to undergoless Arberesh interferences.

• The survey of Albanians in Piana supports patterns of hostility discovered inthe Arberesh survey and demonstrates that there is some conflict between theArberesh community and the immigrant Albanian one.

• Although the antagonistic patterns in group interrelations are relatively weak,there is no solidarity discourse that I could detect. The role of the diaspora asa cushion that facilitates the entrance of the immigrant group in a new societyis missing.

Sociolinguistic relations between Arberesh and Albanians

The first contact between Arberesh and Albanians in Piana is linguistic. Theyknow very little about each other. One thing is certain, though: they arehistorically related. They both want to test how true it is that they speak thesame language; therefore they start speaking. Usually, the next reaction fromboth sides is deep disappointment: they cannot understand each other. Onlyafter quite some time together do they start to understand each other’s speech,and then only very partially.

Arberesh in the last 500 years has been able to maintain its basic vocabularyand grammatical structure. But a great amount of lexical borrowing from Sicilianand Italian has occurred in the situation of language contact. Arberesh grammat-ical structure has also changed in time. There are a large number of Greek lexicalitems as well because of the contacts Arberesh had with Greek before coming toSicily. The intonation and the phonetic features of Arberesh are also different

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from Standard Albanian, although there are similarities with some varieties ofTosk, the southern dialect of Albania. Being a speaker from the southern extremeof Albania helps in feeling more comfortable with Arberesh. Recently, theintensified process of national communication and media impact has restrictedthe functions of Arberesh. The Arberesh language is losing young speakers, thelevel of linguistic competence in the Arberesh community is declining, and itsuse is limited to family and informal communication. Even in informal com-munication the number of competent speakers diminishes and the number of‘semi-speakers’ rises continuously. Young speakers often switch to Italian duringrelaxed interpersonal communication. The pressure of Italian, the dominantlanguage, is felt at all linguistic levels, especially in the lexicon, but also ingrammatical structures. The fact that Arberesh is not written and not taught atschool is one of the main reasons why Italian is causing linguistic attrition. Forthe time being, Arberesh is assigned a lower status compared to Italian, althoughthe linguistic attitude of Arberesh speakers towards Arberesh is still broadlypositive (Derhemi 2002).

The Albanian language, spoken in Albania and Kosovo in the 500 years ofOttoman domination, has of course evolved in directions different from Ar-beresh. Unlike Arberesh, the Albanian language has had continuous contactswith the surrounding languages and with Turkish in particular. The language ofAlbania itself has two main dialectological varieties, which have convergedthrough an intense, well-organised process of linguistic standardisation duringthe communist period. This process has given to Albanian the strength and theprestige of a codified language with a large net of social and cultural functionsfully developed in all registers, in both oral and written forms.

Arberesh is a variety of Albanian, but it is more distant from the mainAlbanian homeland dialects which have been in constant contact and haveundergone the unifying process of standardisation. As expected, the recentinfluences of Italian are much weaker in Albanian than in Arberesh. However,for an Albanian speaker who knows some Italian, it does not take more than amonth to get used to the structures of Arberesh, to relate it to Albanian and tounderstand most of it. For an Arberesh, it is a little harder, especially lexically.Yet there are many community leaders who speak and write a beautifulAlbanian with an Arberesh nuance and charm.

Change of attitudes towards Standard Albanian in Piana

There was a time when knowing Albanian, or even being able to read it, wasregarded as a special honour and virtue in Piana. The way these attitudes havechanged demonstrates that ‘we should view ways of speaking as parts of localresponses to macro-historical processes’ (Gal 1989: 357). Historically, the intellec-tual elite in Piana found pride in knowing and using Albanian, and in havingcontacts with writers and intellectuals inside Albania. During the 1970s until theearly 1980s there was a large wave of activities in Piana that involved thecommunity on a large scale. Arberesh courses at school, radio stations, newspa-pers, dramatic shows, folklore singing and dance groups, local efforts to use thelanguage and the Arberesh rite in church ceremonies, and changing street signsfrom Italian to Arberesh, are just some examples of the revival of language andethnicity in those years. The main factor behind these efforts was the existenceof a large group of young people who deeply cared about the Arberesh question.

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The Arberesh church played a very significant role, its priests imbued with astrong sense of duty towards the community and the Arberesh question.Ethnicity and language formed a link which constituted a vital basis for socialmobilisation (Fishman 1997: 330).

The communist and socialist inclinations of the young Arberesh generation ofthose years were a significant factor in their tendency to relate the culture andthe language of Piana to the country of origin, Albania, which at that time wasunder a communist regime. Albania was seen as a very exotic country, not onlyas the country of Arberesh roots, but also for its idealistic ideology. SuchArberesh attitudes were met by a period of relative openness towards Arbereshby the Albanian communist regime. The ideological intention of this opennesswas to show to the Albanians inside Albania, who lived in complete isolationfrom the rest of the world, that ‘they had brothers all over the world’. Be this asit may, this period helped to foster a relationship between this young generationof teachers, writers, singers and patriotic individuals from Piana, with Albanianwriters, artists and researchers in linguistics and literature. There were severalfruitful exchanges, and strong connections among individuals were created. Onemain result of this period was that the young middle-class generation of Pianabecame convinced that their Arberesh should develop towards Standard Alba-nian. This coincided with the period in which the intellectuals of Kosovo, thenand now part of Yugoslavia, were using Standard Albanian as their literarylanguage in order to linguistically survive both the natural impact of Serbianand the institutional linguistic ‘genocide’ of the Serbian state,7 and furthermoreas a sign of political solidarity with their Albanian brothers from Albania. Themain opinion that circulated in the culturally active Piana circles of this periodwas that the only way to avoid being assimilated by the Italians was to embraceStandard Albanian. Of course, there was no further analysis of how this mightbe done, since the law to protect Piana language and culture was then still anaspiration only. Standard Albanian was used, along with Arberesh, as the mainmeans of communication by the most important newspaper published at thattime in Piana, Mondo Albanese (1981–84).

Soon the young community leaders discovered facts about the actual prob-lems of the Albanian communist leaders whom they had idealised in the past.Of the first wave of refugees in 1990, about 50 who did not know where else togo agreed to go to Piana, sent from a reception centre in Bari. The Pianioti wereeager to see the Albanians of today: so controversial, so far from them and yetalso so near. The idea of being identified as saviours of these ‘brothers-in-need’was very appealing. But their high and mythical expectations of seeing ‘martyrs’and extraordinary people were destroyed by cold reality. The Albanians whocame to Italy in the 1990s were of all kinds – citizens and peasants, clean anddirty, law-abiding and criminal – but all of them shared two features: they werepoor, and after the first few weeks in Piana, they no longer wanted to stay in this‘small town in the mountains’, so unlike the image of Italy they had learnedfrom the Italian TV that Albanians used to watch illegally during the later yearsof communism (Mai 2001).

Meanwhile, the people of Piana soon started focusing more on the negativesides of the Albanian group that had joined their community: their poverty, theircriminal acts and their desire to move to places with more opportunities thanPiana. With neighbourhood gossip negative attitudes soon spread, and eventu-ally the whole community began to withdraw. These processes were addition-

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ally supported by increasingly negative reports about the refugees in the Italianpress. A feeling of embarrassment, almost shame, at having Albanian originsbegan to spread among the Arberesh of Piana.

From the early 1990s the community leaders of Piana slowly changed opinionson the desirability of Standard Albanian as Piana’s ideal written language. Theyreturned to Arberesh, although they do not exclude the possibility of enrichingArberesh with Albanian elements. It is curious to find that sometimes the samepeople who claim that Arberesh can find in itself the means that it needs todevelop into a written form, in fact write mainly in Standard Albanian. Some ofthe community leaders accept that the reason for this change has been the newimmigration from Albania, which strongly altered the expectations and attitudesof the Piana community; others consider it an independent development. In thelinguistic repertoire of Piana, Albanian has a double position: it is positionedlow, under Italian and Arberesh, because it is spoken by Albanian immigrantswho are stigmatised all over Italy, and high, because it is the language used bythe only poets Piana has, is written in a standardised form and is rich inpublications. Loyalty towards the Albanian language is replaced by otherloyalties towards Italian and Sicilian, which have gained the ground lost byAlbanian. The shift in the opinions of community leaders about the use ofArberesh instead of Albanian coincides with the new institutional opportunitiesin Piana, especially the recent steps undertaken in the form of meetings,publications and conferences, after the Italian government passed a law for theprotection of Arberesh minority language and culture.

Patterns of linguistic subordination

Usually, there is a mixed discourse produced during the first contacts betweenArberesh and Albanians. Albanian immigrants have to negotiate their rank inthe Piana system of social, cultural and linguistic hierarchies. In this difficultprocess they have to face the prejudices of the community, the negative propa-ganda of the Italian media, the lack of enough knowledge of Italian that wouldallow a fair negotiation of their position, a very low economic and politicalstatus, total lack of their rights and knowledge of the Italian law in general, lackof official status (especially if they are clandestine in Italy), and lack of thegeneral cultural etiquette that secures a decent position in the new society. Inthese conditions the dynamic of subordination is immediate. Albanian immi-grants try to resist it, but the need for housing and a job is stronger, and situatesthem in a vulnerable position. The low position results in a lot of anger andfrustration. In fact, many immigrants are people with high education and socialrank in their country. But, even for these educated and cultured Albanians, ittakes time, resources and confidence to present themselves in the new society.

Patterns of subordination of the Albanian immigrants often surface in alinguistic way. In general the Arberesh do not want Albanians to talk to themin Albanian, even in cases where they would understand the language. MostAlbanians are expected to change to Arberesh. If they speak in Albanian to anemployer, a housewife or a chief construction worker, they are told ‘How do youspeak?! Speak Arberesh!’ Even Italian is rejected when used by Albanians.Speaking Italian to an Arberesh is sometimes taken as an offence with anunderlying reaction that would read: ‘Why do you speak in Italian? Don’t you

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like Arberesh?’ In the survey with the Albanian participants, all 26 claimed thatArberesh is the language that Pianioti want them to speak.

Younger and more educated members of the community may have a differentview. They appreciate modern Albanian and do not have prejudices toward thelanguage like some older Arberesh who think that Albanian is corruptedthrough Turkish; especially for this latter group, Arberesh is seen as the purerform of Albanian, since it was separated from modern Albanian before theTurkish occupation. But even those Arberesh who adhere to such a belief makea distinction between Albania as an abstract concept, related to language,literature and the mythical land of the ancestors, and the concrete immigrantAlbanians of today.

While Albanian is a healthy, active and fully-developed language, today’sArberesh lives on the brink of functional and structural destruction. Neverthe-less, it is interesting to note that, through its speakers, it has the power to expressand reinforce patterns of ideological and social dominance over Albanian. SinceArberesh is not a written language, Albanian has the advantage of the prestigeof any written and codified language. This does not change the social relationbetween Arberesh and Albanian, though. When a social hierarchy betweengroups is created, the grammatical structures, weak or strong, are not powerfulenough to change the state of affairs among social groups. In its relationshipwith Italian, Arberesh is increasingly losing ground because of its functional andstructural problems of attrition. In its relation with Italian, Arberesh is not thelanguage of the dominant group, but of the minority group. However, in thiscontext I could not detect any patterns of inferiority towards Italians among theArberesh of Piana. Yet in relation to the Albanian spoken by Albanian immi-grants, Arberesh is the majority and dominant language. In both cases, thesociolinguistic patterns – who speaks what, when and why – reflect the econ-omic hierarchies of the community.

Perhaps reflecting their very disadvantaged economic, political and socialsituation, the migrant Albanians of Piana are not proud of their language and itsvalues. Among the majority of Arberesh, Albanian is stigmatised, because itsspeakers are stigmatised. Among the majority of Albanians it is stigmatisedbecause Arberesh and Italians, who are both more powerful, stigmatise it.Albanian immigrants reinforce the pattern of subordination by trying to imitatethe pattern used by the more powerful. There is a chance that in this process theAlbanian immigrant group will become more critical and acquire consciousnessof itself; but time and ideological struggle are the critical conditions for this tohappen, and both are lacking. This situation supports the Gramscian concept ofthe way power and hegemony are created ‘through a combination of coercionand consent’ between groups consisting of ‘pluralistic, multifaceted and complexselves’ and not as a simplistically direct reflection of the economic position ofgroups with a formed ideology and set of values (Christians 2001: 4).

Any sociolinguistic shift is strongly determined by the attitudes of the speak-ers. However, the community of speakers participates and shapes the shiftwithout being aware of its role in it. As Bourdieu maintains: ‘the views andattitudes held by community members toward an official language or toward alinguistic shift, frequently result from the inculcations of dispositions rather thanbeing the product of a consciously developed set of beliefs’ (Bourdieu 1991: 51).Yet, these unconscious acts are always present in discourse and are often theunderlying code to decide about the future of a language. The way a language

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is seen by different groups and the attitude towards it are also a result of theseunconscious beliefs. Albanian in Piana is not indexed as a solidarity code, nor asa neutral code by either Arberesh or Albanians. Arberesh itself is havingproblems of ideological indexation by its own speakers: now that Italian is thedominant language in Piana, the language of school, science, politics and media,Arberesh is limited to informal everyday communication and is undergoingattrition. Arberesh, besides being indexed as a solidarity code, is also indexed asa more antiquated code. But in relation to Albanian, Arberesh is consideredsuperior in Piana: it does not have the social label of ‘emigrant’s code’, likeAlbanian does.

The linguistic subordination of the new Albanians of Piana is only the surfaceof a deeper phenomenon of subordination, which is not just economic. Underthe pressure of a very negative media-created image, Albanians feel culturallyand humanly inferior. Not in Piana, where everybody knows everybody, butin other parts of Italy, it is sometimes the case that Albanians try notto speak Albanian even with each other. Believing that their Italian soundsnative, and in a country where regional dialects and varied pronunciationsabound, they try to hide their origins from Italians and from other Albaniansas well. For the time being, Albanian immigrants prefer not to speak Albanianin order not to be associated with other Albanians.8 The Piana situation is apart of this larger situation. While Arberesh serves as a code of solidarityamong Arberesh, Albanian serves as a code of embarrassment amongAlbanians outside of Albania, and as a code of exclusion in Italian and Arbereshcommunities.

In conjunction with other elements, language serves as a marker of socialidentity and is used to generate Weberian ‘social closure’ (Lamont 2001). Socialboundaries, in-group/out-group comparison and social inequalities are createdand reinforced through the use of language. Social closure is expressed symbol-ically, ranging from pity for the immigrant to pure discrimination, all of whichexpressions reinforce patterns of subordination of the ‘outsiders’. Behaviouralpatterns of dominance and subordination are not characteristic of Arberesh andAlbanian immigrants in Piana only. They are generally common in cases ofcontact between groups with different backgrounds and histories, and theArberesh and Albanian communities constitute just one more example.

Dorian offers an explanatory basis for the way immigrants perceive their ownethnicity and language. She writes: ‘A people and their language – what couldbe more straightforward?’ (1999: 25). The social and historical character ofethnicity, however, she perceives as primal. Then she adds: ‘socially constructedcategories are subject to change. People will redefine themselves when circum-stances make it desirable or when circumstances force it on them’. As shown inthis paper, Albanian immigrants have both these sorts of reason to try toredefine themselves in the new circumstances of emigration. The way ofdefining and redefining themselves may vary according to the individual’sbackground, their social status and the identity a person held in the homecountry. However, as Dorian (1999: 26) explains, the situation in the host countryworks almost always to the newcomers’ disadvantage:

If the more powerful, more prestigious, and wealthier people in a country or a region speakone or two languages, those languages will become the desirable languages, the ones peoplewho were not born to them want to learn to speak.

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Diglossia and di-ethnia: Arberesh and Albanians

In this section I discuss the linguistic behaviour of the community of Piana withrespect to two main languages used by the Arberesh community of Piana,Arberesh and Italian, and the linguistic behaviour of the Albanian immigrantgroup which has settled in Piana in respect of their linguistic repertoire thatincludes Albanian, Arberesh and Italian.

Ferguson (1959: 335) provides a useful definition of diglossia:

Diglossia is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primarydialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is avery divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, thevehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or inanother speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used formost written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any section of the communityfor ordinary conversation.

Schiffman elaborates that ‘diglossia is a gradient, variable phenomenon, whichcannot easily be boxed in an either/or binary system of categorization’ (1997:208). In fact, I see diglossia more in Fishman’s (1967) terms which differs fromthe original definition of Ferguson in one major respect: it is extended to twounrelated languages and not limited to two varieties of the same language only.This type of diglossia is often referred to as ‘extended diglossia’.

The main feature of the term diglossia, stable from 1959 when Ferguson gavethe first complete definition, is the functional separatism of the two languagesinvolved in a diglossic relationship and their hierarchic relationship in terms ofprestige and social status. However, as pointed out by Scotton (1986), since twoof these conditions for classical diglossia are, firstly, that everyone speaks theLow variation as a mother tongue, and secondly that the High variety is notused in informal conversations, few truly diglossic communities really exist.

The relationship between Piana Arberesh and Italian, as shown in the linguis-tic behaviour of the Piana Arberesh community, is a diglossic relation of the‘extended’ type. But every diglossic situation has its own particular features.Although the Arberesh language, as mentioned in the previous section, isundergoing rapid attrition, it is still largely spoken in everyday communication.It has crystallised this function especially during the last few decades. Thelanguage used in more formal communication levels, like school lessons, anytype of communication on official matters, political debate and cultural meetingsis Italian. But diglossia is also situated in a continuum (Schiffman 1997: 210) inwhich linguistic and social changes occur continually. So the domains in whicheach of the languages is used depend on variables such as age, education andprofession. While the domains in which Arberesh is used are undergoingattrition, Italian thrives both in the old domains already controlled by thislanguage and in its expanding use in informal, familiar and confidential dis-courses. Hence the uses of Arberesh and of Italian are no longer in a comple-mentary juxtaposition. Until only a few decades ago the Arberesh community ofPiana used Arberesh exclusively in informal and family settings. Today thefunctional differentiation and hierarchical relationship between Arberesh andItalian are still maintained by the fact that Arberesh is unwritten and its uselimited to the spoken/informal realm, while Italian is the only written languagein the repertoire of Arberesh speakers and, as a consequence, the only languagerelated to formal registers.

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According to Ferguson (1959), the characteristic that separates bilingualismfrom diglossia is the ‘functional differentiation of discrepant varieties’ in the caseof diglossia. In the terms of Fishman et al. (1985), diglossia must be rooted insocietal institutional regulations or the natural linguistic compartmentalisationof the languages of a community.

Arberesh speakers of Piana are bilinguals: they speak fluent Italian and havemaintained Arberesh. In different degrees this community has been bilingual fora long time. The Arberesh community of Piana is also bicultural. The originalAlbanian culture has had a long history of coexistence and contact withSicilian/Italian culture. This coexistence did not lead to a process of accultura-tion of the Arberesh community. Through an interesting balance betweenconservative and innovative tendencies, closed and open communication withthe world outside Piana, the Arberesh managed to maintain their language tothe present day, to use both languages, to be part of both cultures and to adapta special religious rite with features derived both from the Greek Orthodox oftheir Albanian origin and from the Catholic rite found in Italy. In terms ofnationality, the Arberesh consider themselves Italian and live like Italians inmany respects. Although their native language is Arberesh, their Italian isflawless and their knowledge of Italian tradition, literature and history is asgood as that of any other Italians. The Arberesh were one of the most activegroups in the South of Italy to support the movement for the unification of Italyled by Garibaldi. Their relation with Sicilians and Italians has been generallygood and without any open conflicts. I consider the lack of animosity towardsthe majority group to be a condition of real and complete biculturism. It seemstherefore justified to call Arberesh bicultural9 as well as bilingual.

Fishman et al.’s (1985: 46) analysis of the concepts ‘bilingual’ and ‘bicultural’relates them to two other concepts: ‘diglossia’ and ‘di-ethnia’. With respect tothis symmetric bifurcation, bilingual and bicultural are terms used to refer toindividual patterns of the use of two languages or two types of ethno-culturalbehaviour. The first one exists in the sociolinguistic realm, the other in theethno-cultural realm. Fishman discusses the counterparts of these two conceptson a societal level. For the sociolinguistic realm, the concept of ‘diglossia’ isknown. As explained above, this refers to a societal bilingualism with functionaland social hierarchical differentiation of the languages. For the ethno-culturaldomain, Fishman suggests the term ‘di-ethnia’. This refers to the biculturismspread in an entire community. Unlike bilingualism and biculturism, diglossiaand di-ethnia are sustained by means of specific institutional arrangements. Forexample the Greek-Byzantine church rite of the Arberesh community is at theheart of the original cultural orientation of Piana. Therefore, the characteristicPiana costumes are mainly used for the religious events of the Orthodox rite andnot for Italian and Catholic rites. Piana celebrates all the Italian festivals and alsothe Catholic ones, but the Arberesh costumes are not worn in the Italian events.10

The costumes are reserved to symbolically mark the original Arberesh ethnicityand to differentiate this from the second – Italian – cultural identity. The Pianacommunity is thus characterised by all four features: bilingualism, biculturism,diglossia and di-ethnia.

The Albanian immigrants of Piana have to adapt their linguistic and culturalbehaviour to the bilingual and bicultural Arberesh community of Piana. Albani-ans in Piana participate in continuous bilingual (Albanian–Arberesh) and some-times trilingual interactions (with Italian). As was shown above, their lower

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socio-economic position in Piana has caused a linguistic community attitude thatconsiders Albanian as the Low (L) status language in relation to Arberesh as theHigh (H) status language. Contrary to expectation (cf. Schiffman 1997: 208), theexistence of a written form, the innovative potential of a standardised languageand of a large body of literature in contemporary Albanian, play no roleregarding its prestige in Piana. Albanian ranks low as it is the language of theimmigrants who are poorer and in continuous need of work, housing and helpof all kinds.

The situation, however, is more complex than this. The way H and L roles ofthe languages interplay and exchange with each other is sociolinguisticallyfascinating. In Piana the endangered language, Arberesh, appears as H, whileAlbanian, the thriving genetically-related language, is in the L status. In thesame setting, Arberesh appears as H towards Albanian but L towards Italian.And yet in Piana, where for most of the Arberesh speech community Albanianappears as L language, there is a group of community leaders – poets, teachersand other cultural and religious activists – who not only know and useAlbanian, but also treat it as H in relation to their own language Arberesh. Thesedata suggest that the social meanings of a language used and the relationshipbetween languages are highly complex and dynamic.

In their new homes in Piana, Albanians exclusively use their own language,although it has been strongly influenced by Arberesh. Outside of their home,with the neighbours, in the square, in the shops and with their employers andwork colleagues, they are obliged to use Arberesh, coping with all the flaws ofa dying language in addition to the problems of their incomplete knowledge ofit. This situation would qualify for diglossia, since the languages have twoseparated functions, and are positioned as H and L in the scale of prestige.However, diglossias take time to develop and the differentiated functions ofAlbanian and Arberesh are too new to be crystallised and stable. Furthermore,the competence in both languages of the speakers is not perfect, it is not auniform societal phenomenon, and the diglossia is partial because only Albani-ans and not Arberesh use both languages. It is too soon to foresee the precisefuture of the relationship between these two languages in rapid change, partic-ularly when taking the influence of Italian schooling on the immigrant childreninto account. Generally, the Albanian competence in different domains andregisters of Italian is also very different to the Arberesh.

In other words the Albanian community of Piana, with rare exceptions, is aspeech community characterised by the lack of an H language. They appear asa community that is mute11 in H language and imperfect in the L language. Invarious domains the choice for these speakers is either to demonstrate animperfect linguistic knowledge which they are aware of, or to be silent. Thesocial meanings related to this group and their language allocates them theposition of the powerless. Their linguistic silence contributes to their currentlystigmatised social situation and will not help to overcome it soon. The way therelationship between the two languages has developed has been completelynatural, without any institutional interferences.

As for their ‘bicultural’ character, the Albanians of Piana are undergoing aprocess of culturisation, which might result in a ‘bicultural’ stage – but it is tooearly to say. An indispensable condition for reaching biculturalism and thendi-ethnia is the stable contact with the other language and culture over a longperiod of time. However, as demonstrated above, the Albanian immigrants of

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Piana hardly qualify as a stable diaspora community yet. Another condition ofbiculturalism is a raise in ethnic and linguistic consciousness and a strongself-confidence but, as Dorian writes, ‘that kind of self-confidence is hard tocome by in communities which have suffered the penalties of an ideology ofcontempt over a long period of time’ (Dorian 1998: 20).

Based on the current state of affairs, the expected outcome is that, after two orthree generations, the Albanian language and culture of the Albanian immi-grants will be lost. It is easier for a community to lose the memory of place andpast ‘belongingness’ – the explanatory word used by Fishman (1997: 329) todefine ‘ethnicity’ – in a climate of social, economic and cultural subordination.

However, prospects of becoming a bicultural and later a di-ethnic communitylook better if the Albanians of Piana would develop a pattern of returningfrequently to Albania, while keeping their homes in Piana. The distance betweenPiana and Albania is not great, but the economic and social difficulties ofAlbanians in Piana do not support this pattern at the moment. Lastly, it is notnecessarily best ‘to favor diglossia or to consider it to be a wise or desirablesocial arrangement for the solution of each and every ethnocultural problem …’(Fishman et al. 1985: 53). Perhaps some Albanian immigrants choose ‘relin-guification’ as a passport to membership in the new larger group and ‘re-ethnification’ as a marker of modernisation, and do not feel they need their tieswith the past at all. This is not a likely scenario, especially considering thepresent very close relationship with family and relatives in Albania; neverthelessit exists as a possibility. Besides, as the Arberesh case shows, it is not alwaysnecessary to lose one’s original language and culture in order to gain a newlanguage and culture.

Conclusion

When the Arberesh arrived in Sicily in the late medieval era, they found moreor less the same economic conditions that they had left behind. They movedfrom an agricultural life into another similar environment. Soon, the Arbereshwere given land and the right to settle and to found their own town. With somechanges and concessions they were able to maintain their original religious rite.The institutional arrangements helped to shape the process of integration in thenew place (Verzı 1990). Apart from occasional frictions, in general Arberesh lifewas very similar to the life of the surrounding Sicilian population. There werefewer factors to support patterns of subordination at that time. By contrast, inthe early 1990s, after the first month of welfare support, the Albanians of Pianawere left alone and abandoned by the institutions and by most of the citizens(Anon. 1994: 72). As my survey among the contemporary Arberesh has shown,the feelings of most Arberesh toward Albanians are neither positive nor neutral.What the Arberesh arrivals encountered 500 years earlier was something differ-ent: Silvia Verzı, in her thesis chapter on Piana’s history (1990: 29), describes thenatives’ reception of Arberesh as decisively positive.

Besides, at that time the community of Arberesh had no other choice but tosettle. For anybody who wanted to return to Albania, travel was very difficult.Albania was still occupied by the Ottoman Turks and remained so for more thanfour centuries. Stationary life was thus the only option left to them, whicheventually resulted in prosperity passed on from one generation to the next.

The Arberesh came to Piana as an entire community with a complex and

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hierarchically structured social network among its members (Verzı 1990). Incontrast, the recent wave of immigration of Albanians happened in muchsmaller units, often individuals. Contemporary Albanian immigrants to Italy areunprotected by their own Albanian state, and in Italy they lack the strength of‘belonging’ to an independent, organised, institutionally recognised group. TheArberesh of Piana, in contrast, were always regarded as a minority in Italy, butthey were the majority in their own town, which made up their whole worldthat mattered until a few decades ago. The recent Albanian immigrants, on theother hand, may be considered a minority in respect of their small numbers;however, they lack any particular rights or privileges, and do not have the statusof a community, neither in Piana nor anywhere else in the world.

It was possible for the Arberesh to maintain their language not only becausePiana is closed off by mountains, but also because at the time communicationwas much more limited and there were hardly any effects of media or schooling.Today, technological developments, compulsory schooling, mass media andother intensified means of communication have accelerated the process ofassimilation not only for the Albanians, but also for the Arberesh as the attritionof their language shows. But language maintenance was not just a matter oflucky circumstances outwith the control of the Arberesh community itself. TheArberesh of Piana actively chose to maintain their language because theyrealised that it was easier to face the new world and build prosperity as anethnic unit distinguishable from the surrounding communities. Even today theystill think that being different from other Sicilians has been an exclusivelypositive factor in Piana’s history. Contemporary Albanian immigrants do notthink in the same way.

In conclusion, the two population movements happened in different historicalcontexts and have very different social and political consequences. There is agreat difference between Arberesh and Albanians regarding the (unofficial)privileged status of ‘minority’ which the former seem always to have had, andthe decidedly low status of ‘immigrant’ which the Albanians have. The situationin Piana also shows that a diaspora should not necessarily be seen as a ‘heaven’for new immigrants of the same origin, just because it is a diaspora.

Notes

1 The Arberesh of Piana still sing a very beautiful folkloric song about the Arberesh ‘whose heartscry for the distant land of Morea’.

2 For instance, the use of the Arberesh future, ‘ka vete’ (I will go – Arb.), instead of the Albanianfuture, ‘do shkoj’ (I will go – Alb). The future in Standard Albanian and in the dialects spoken bythe speech communities from which the Albanians of Piana originate, is of the ‘futurum voluntatis’type and is formed with the verb ‘do’ (will), while the future of Arberesh is of the ‘futurumnecessitatis’ type with ‘kam’ (to have).

3 In Italian the words used to categorise Albanians that I have included under the Englishtranslation ‘criminal’ are ‘criminali’, ‘delinquenti’, ‘teppisti’.

4 Literally, non-EU immigrants; in practice a term used in Italian in an often derogatory sense tomean ‘poor, Third-World immigrants’ and perhaps ‘illegal’ too.

5 I acknowledge, however, that this is based on personal impressions rather than on systematicdata.

6 Note that the socio-economic differences between the capital, Tirana, and other towns andespecially villages in Albania, are much greater than in West European countries.

7 See Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) for more information about the term ‘linguistic genocide’.8 This statement reflects my observations in Italy during the 1990s. But in my very recent visits to

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communities of Albanian immigrants, I have had the strong feeling that there is a tendency forthe ethnic and cultural consciousness of the immigrant groups to be on the increase.

9 I say this without considering the cultural differences between Italy as a whole and Sicily as partof it.

10 Recently the dresses are worn more frequently than before, since they have become part of atourist attraction. Still, there is a big difference in the quantity of women dressed in costumes forChristmas, which in Piana is celebrated as an important Catholic feast, and for Easter, which inPiana is celebrated according to the rituals of the Orthodox rite, and therefore is considered anArberesh feast.

11 Schiffman (1996: 199) explains that the fact that an L variety can be understood by H speakersdoes not mean that the L speakers will use it in H domains: ‘The expectation is that they willremain silent rather than exhibit inappropriate norms’.

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di Catania, unpublished graduation thesis (tesi di laurea).Zgusta, L. (2001) ‘Diaspora: the past in the present’, in Kachru, B. and Nelson, C. (eds) Diaspora,

Identity and Language Community. Special issue of Studies in Linguistic Sciences, 31(1): 291–9.

Author detailsEda Derhemi is Research Associate in Multilingual and Multicultural Communication at the Instituteof Communications Research, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

She may be contacted at:

E-mail: derhemi@uiuc.edu

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