Slavic enclaves in Italy: Some remarks on Molise Slavic

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Molise Slavic (na-našu, lit. ‘our way’) is an umbrella term which groups three severely endangered subvarieties of the same South Slavic microlanguage spoken in three rural municipalities located in the province of Campobasso (Molise), Southern Italy - namely, Acquaviva Collecroce (Kruč), San Felice del Molise (Filič), and Montemitro (Mundimitar) (Appendix 1). Lexical and morphonological evidence, including the uneven presence of Western Štokavian- and Southern Čakavian-I kavian elements, strongly suggests that the ancestors of contemporary Molise Slavic speakers fled around the beginning of the XVI century from a territory comprised between the rivers Cetina and Neretva, in the Dalmatian hinterland (most likely the Neretva valley, nowadays in Bosnia and Herzegovina), in order to escape the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans (Rešetar, 1997: 55). In 21 century, Molise Slavic varieties, which have been severed from the Croatian dialectal continuum for almost six centuries, find themselves in a situation of long-standing (i. e., absolute) language contact with the regional varieties of Italian spoken in and around Campobasso; conversely, neighboring Molise dialect(s) and Neapolitan, which once was a prestige language, are not actively mastered by Molise Slavic L1 speakers anymore (Adamou et al., 2016: 516-517). This multilayered and ever-evolving sociolinguistic situation, which can be captured by formalizing tendential patterns of interaction among grammatical systems in contact (the so-called diagrammar), has triggered massive modular changes in both the lexicon and grammar of all three Molise Slavic varieties. On the one hand, a sizeable number of lexical borrowings from Regional and Standard Italian, especially nouns, have percolated into each variety, oftentimes replacing older Slavisms (Adamou et al., 2016: 526, 532); at the same time functional categories, such as prepositions and numerals (Rešetar, 1997: 133-134; Sujoldžić, 2004: 267), have been affected the least. On the other hand, the original Štokavian case paradigm has undergone a significant defoliation. Both the second (neuters ending in -e/-o) and fourth declension (feminines ending in -i) have long disappeared and their members converged towards the grammatical gender of the adstrate language; cf. Bosnian- Croatian- Montenegrin- Serbian language zdrâvlj-eneut > Molise Slavic zdravlj-(a)fem (Italian salut-efem ‘health’) and Bosnian- Croatian-M ontenegrin- Serbian language kȓv- Øfem > Molise Slavic krv- Ømas (Italian sangu-emas ‘blood’). The case system, which has been retained despite the considerable influence from Romance models (Wiemer, 2020: 284), has also suffered a similar fate. While the loss of the locative case has brought along a functional extension of the accusative to stative contexts, other oblique cases not encoding grammatical relations can be only be licensed by previously redundant prepositional elements, e. g., ključ do vrat ‘door key’ (lit. ‘key-to-door’), sa ga štoknija s jenme nožam ‘I am cutting it with the knife’, and the like. As for the tempo- aspectual system, attributable to Romance influence are, among other things, the functional shrinking of the aorist, the parallel expansion of the imperfect towards the counterfactual domain, and the use of new inceptive and obligative constructions to express future meaning. Since the beginning of the 21 century, there emerged a number of different initiatives aimed at reversing the ongoing process of language decay and stimulating in loco the active engagement of younger generations. As it is well known, the sensible reduction in the number of Molise Slavic L1 speakers and the constant increase of (younger) Molise Slavic semi-speakers or passive speakers, paralleled by the assimilation of Molise Slavic varieties to the national language, a long-lasting demographic crisis fueled by labor migration, and a delayed onset of (traditional) literacy have been frequently mentioned among the causes speeding up the exfoliation of areal (layered) language density (Grenoble, Whaley, 2006: 36-38). On an international level, following the ratification of the 1981 Arfè Resolution (“Resolution on a Community Charter of Regional Languages and Cultures and on a Charter of Rights of Ethnic Minorities”) and the 1992 European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, the new and far-reaching research program EuroSlav 2010 [12] has been developed and launched, with the broader aim of investigating a number of endangered Slavic varieties in non-S lavic speaking European countries - including Molise Slavic. By 2020-s, three electronic corpora comprising a number of annotated (i. e., morphologically tagged) oral interviews and recordings with active speakers of all the three variants of Molise Slavic have been released on Pangloss and made publicly available (Kruč [13], Filić [14], Mundimitar [15]). A related selection [16] of texts has been subsequently published in a separate monograph (Breu, 2017); a new descriptive grammar, twenty years after the first attempt (Sammartino, 2004), is being developed in the 2020-s. On a national level, although the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages was formally implemented within the 1999 Framework Law 482, there is still no national and/or regional law that recognizes either Molise Slavic variety as an independent language (Vollstädt, 2019: 100). This legislative gap is perceived as a blatant asymmetry of political and financial support from the Italian government for minority activities in the South as opposed to Northern regions (Šimičić, Škevin Rajko, 2021: 6). Accordingly, unlike other other renowned cases (cf. for a comparative discussion of the dichotomy Spanish- Basque (Arzoz, 2015)), no real language planning policy has been pursued for Molise Slavic varieties on a national level; for example, neither variety has been consistently featured in media and literature, nor have they been adopted in formal and official environments, such as public administration and religious ceremonies, where Standard Italian still predominates. Somehow paradoxically, financial support to various minority activities has been provided by Croatia, ever since the promulgation of the 124/2011 Zakon o odnosima Republike Hrvatske s Hrvatima izvan Republike Hrvatske ‘Act on the Relations between the Republic of Croatia and the Croatians outside the Republic of Croatia’ (Šimičić, Škevin Rajko, 2021: 4). Institutional support of the Croatian state towards linguistic diaspora phenomena has included, among other initiatives, the development of a long-term teaching plan of Standard (štokavian-j ekavian) Croatian to young Molise Slavic (semi-)speakers in primary and (lower) secondary schools, as well as the initiation of institutional visits to and from Croatia (twinnings with Croatian villages, e. g., Kruč-V idovec, Filić- Omiš; other joint cultural activities). However, the permanent disregard towards Molise Slavic varieties (which are not taught neither in primary nor in secondary schools) seems to be a decisive factor contributing to their loss. The most promising strategies of bottom-up language revitalization have been undertaken on a local level. They have led, on the one hand, to the establishment of a number of cultural associations (such as the Agostina Piccoli Foundation [17]), magazines and journals (such as Riča živa (Riča živa) and Kamastra / Komoštre (Kamastra), which followed in the footsteps of Naš jezik / La nostra lingua, active from 1967 to 1970) promoting the development of a full-blown literacy in Molise Slavic. On the other hand, local literacy has been further fostered by several other multimodal projects, including the Mundimitar- based folk group KroaTarantata (KroaTarantata) (which blends Southern Italian folk music and Molise Slavic original texts) and the related web radio Čujemo se [18], which has played a pivotal role in the organization of forums for young Croatian minorities. Moreover, a small group of linguistically trained activists working at the local language counseling services and coordinated by the editorial board of Kamastra / Komoštre has given to the press a new thematic-o riented lexicon covering primarily public space, the political sphere and craft related terms in all the three variants of MS, which is strategically centered around interacting interviews with Molise Slavic L1 speakers (Pugliese, Agresti, 2019).