"Κιό γκλιούχα Αρμπερίστε
ίστε γκλιούχ τρεμερίστε
Έ φλίτ ναυαρχοί Μιαούλη
Μπότσαρη έδε γκίθ Σούλι"
"Why were not the Arvanites assimilated like other multilingual speaking groups in Greece, and why has the Arvanitic language survived in some parts of Greece until today? Most of the towns that still speak Arvanitic are located in the Argolis region
of the Peloponnese. Older generations of people (between the ages of 60–100+) from these towns continue to speak Arvanitic as well as Greek. Many of the younger generations have working knowledge of the language. The towns of Prosymni and Limnes seem to have the greatest number of speakers today. The towns neighbor one another,
but are still about 4 kilometers apart. Limnes is on higher elevation at about 520 meters above sea level where Prosymni is closer to lower ground. The nearest metropolitan cities are Argos and Nafplion. But the locals in Limnes still prefer to go into Corinth instead of Argos or Nafplion. Today modern roads have made it easier to access the towns, but for some time both Prosymni and Limnes had been mostly isolated. Several other towns in the area such as, Manesi, Dendra, Mykines, Inachos,Ira, Monastiraki, Neo Iraio, at one time are also thought to have also spoken Arvanitic at one time.There is no question however, that Arvanitic is dying and will likely disappear with the next generation. The locals in the towns in Prosymni and Limnes likely learned Greek when systems of communications and commerce were extended to the neighboring commercial towns of Argos and Nafplion. Greek had historically been the language of trade in the region. We know that the residents had schools of some form or another from Ottoman times onward, and that some years after Greek independence a national Greek school had appeared in the region. Arvanite was partly preserved because the Arvanitic speaking communities in the area were not in the area of expansion sought by the Greek state for most of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (they had become part of the Greek kingdom after the Revolution).
The Megali Idea or Greece’s nineteenth century policy to reclaim lands that were thought to be Greek (and usually at the expense of other nation), looked to recreate ancient and Byzantine Greece based along geographic and cultural lines. Thessaly was incorporated in 1881, most of Macedonia and Epirus in 1913, and Western Thrace in 1919. Non-Greek speakers from these areas felt the most pressure to drop their local languages and adopt Greek. Moreover, the Greek state diverted thier educational resources in these areas. Schools were opened to teach Greek and locals eventually dropped their native tongues.This type of pressure never occurred in most of the Arvanitic speaking towns in the Peloponnese, since they were already part of the Greek state. It was also essentially the women; the mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers who helped
preserve the language in these towns. The language was learned by children in informal learning settings, in a space and around people that they were most comfortable around. It was a language that community members associated with their past, and with those that cared and nurtured them. "(THEODORE G. ZERVAS, 2014)