Sagnette Pasta
Maccheroni Pasta
Country Orecchiette
The Salento dialect is a variant of the extreme southern Italian dialects such as the dialects spoken in Sicily, central-southern Calabria and the southernmost tip of Cilento.
The area of the Salento dialect includes the entire province of Lecce, a large part of the province of Brindisi and the south-eastern portion of the province of Taranto.
The history of the Salento dialects, of Messapian origin, is very complex and multifaceted.
deriving from a deep-rooted bilingualism between Romance languages (Latin) and Byzantine Greek. derivante da un bilinguismo ben radicato tra lingua romanza (latina) e greca bizantina.
Già nel periodo della Magna Grecia, with the ever-increasing importance of agriculture compared to industry, the areas that until then were rural acquired urban importance; consequently, there was a restructuring of the social classes that also involved a reorganization at the linguistic level: ancient Greek, a vernacular language spoken only in the rustic areas, became part of urban life, thus accompanying Latin (the official language) and influencing it at the phonetic, lexical and morphosyntactic level. This process of linguistic rooting continued with the advent of the Byzantine Empire, starting from the 6th century. Thus, Romance Salento and Greek-Byzantine Salento were born, the result of mutual borrowings from the antecedent dialects of the area (Latin and Greek) and direct ancestors of the current Salento dialects.
Loans and mutual influences between the Romance and Byzantine languages persisted throughout much of the Early Middle Ages and in certain periods there was a greater influence of Greek on Latin.
The first written traces of the Salento language that have reached us date back to the 11th century: they are 154 glosses, written in Hebrew characters, contained in a manuscript preserved in Parma, which dates back to around 1072, coming from a Talmudic academy in Otranto. The Salento used in the glosses is still balanced between Latin and Vulgar, with several Greekisms.
One of the most important and useful literary sources for the study of the Salento dialect is the Libro di Sidrac otrantino, or the Salento vernacular translation of the Libro di Sidrac.
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