Language Contact in Corfioto: The ‘Core’ and the ‘Periphery’. A Contribution to the Atlas of the Balkan Linguistic Area

Abstract

Corfioto, the Balkan Venetan variety traditionally spoken by the Corfiot Jews, is the least known and the most recently documented endangered variety still spoken in Greece. While the role of language contact has been long presented as central in the emergence of some of its grammatical features in previous studies, the description and the analysis of the variety has focused mainly on synchronic aspects, compared mainly to Italo-Romance and Greek. The identification of some phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of Corfioto in the Atlas of the Balkan Linguistic Area (Adamou & Sobolev 2025) is a first attempt to identify some of its phenomena pointing to language contact with respect to other languages presenting similar structural affinities in a comparative areal perspective. I hereby investigate certain structural features of Corfioto, whose emergence points to contact of Romance and Greek, with respect to relevant features characterizing geographically neighboring and genetically affiliated languages. Bringing sociolinguistic and purely linguistic evidence for the contact of different language sources used by the Corfiot Jews during the century-long contact urban setting of Corfu, I argue that while the emergence of certain features may be robustly supported via an analysis in terms of contact with different languages and varieties, a unidirectional analysis of the transfer of certain features from a single source language to Corfioto seems difficult to adopt in many cases. It is proposed that different sociolinguistic factors at play and language sources spoken in and out of the Balkan peninsula are relevant in demarcating the position of Corfioto with respect to the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery’ of the Balkan Spachbund.