Paper short abstract:

My paper presents the multiple temporal and emotional ‘textures’ of Griko, a ‘dying’ language used in the Southern Italian province of Lecce, as well as the divergent visions of temporality and affect evoked by Griko-speakers and activists embedded in the current revival of Griko.

Paper long abstract:

In a special issue dedicated to 'Temporality and Historicity in and through Linguistic Ideology' (2004) linguistic anthropologists Woolard, Blommaert, Cavanaugh, Inoue and Eisenlohr explored how socially inscribed views, perceptions and feelings about a language (i.e. language ideologies) "both produce and are produced by multiple and heterogeneous histories and temporalities" (Irvine 2004: 1). Drawing on these insights and based on my ethnographic data, my proposed paper highlights the multiple temporal and emotional 'textures' of Griko, a 'dying' language used in the Southern Italian province of Lecce, as well as the divergent visions of temporality and affect evoked by Griko-speakers and activists. Through the analysis of the current revival of Griko I show how locals do not share the same phenomenological references about this language hence their language ideologies of Griko are inscribed in non-homogenous "historicities" (Hirsch's and Stewart's 2005:262). In particular I draw attention to how the time embedded in and evoked by Griko feels different, depending on the underlying language ideology, which alternatively associates it to the glorious Hellenic past (Griko activists) or to the more recent past of poverty and subalternity of the Italian South (elderly Griko-speakers); this in turn awakes different emotional textures. The current revival, I argue, provides the space where these different temporal and emotional textures meet projecting Griko as an invaluable resource for social and cultural redemption into the future. The language ideology approach provides, therefore, a lens through which the affective dimension of time and the temporal dimension of affect converge and become mutually constitutive of reality.