Some figures
Puglia has just under 4 million inhabitants, Calabria almost 2 million and Basilicata less than 600,000. Together, these three regions account for more than 6 million of the country's 60,000,000 inhabitants. Puglia is home to the two largest urban centers in the far south: Bari (315,473 inhabitants) and Taranto (185,909 inhabitants). Next comes Calabria, with Reggio di Calabria (168,572 inhabitants). Basilicata is a distant second, with Potenza (63,839) and Matera (59,586).
One of the characteristics of Puglia's population distribution is its concentration in medium-sized towns, i.e. the old agricultural centers to which have been added new residential districts and small autonomous economic clusters. Around 35% of the region's population lives in eleven towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants, 45% in those with between 10,000 and 50,000 inhabitants, and the remaining 20% in small towns.
Basilicata, the most landlocked of the three regions, whose population has grown little since the 1980s, has nevertheless seen its two main towns double in size in 40 years. Today, a third of the local population lives in the region's top ten communes, all of which have more than 10,000 inhabitants.
In Calabria, urban settlement patterns have changed radically in the space of a few years: municipalities with fewer than 15,000 inhabitants are losing population, those with between 15,000 and 30,000 inhabitants remain stationary, and those with more than 30,000 inhabitants are growing. In Calabria, too, the population is shifting from inland villages to coastal towns.
Between emigration and immigration
From 1870, following the unification of the Kingdom of Italy, the country began to industrialize, but struggled to catch up with its European neighbors. The majority of the Italian population was rural, and 70% of them were farmers. Many of them live in poverty, cultivating a plot of land that is insufficient to meet household needs, or are employed by large landowners for a pittance. The Italian diaspora was therefore essentially an economic phenomenon, which would experience two waves of migration: the first between 1880 and 1914, the second in the aftermath of the Second World War. Records of the first wave of migration show that around 380,000 Apulians, 880,000 Calabrians and 385,000 Lucanians left the country. Their preferred destinations were the American continent (USA, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela), Australia and Northern Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany). After the Second World War, migratory movements resumed, especially towards Northern Europe, in demand for labor. Internal migration also developed: the industrial cities of north-western Italy (Turin, Milan) attracted workers from the Mezzogiorno.
Although Italian emigration dried up in the early 1970s, migratory movements are still a reality in southern Italy today. Economic difficulties and a lack of job opportunities are driving southerners, especially younger ones, to settle in the north of the country, in Lombardy, Veneto, Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, or abroad. The locals will tell you: everyone has a relative who has left the region.
Alongside this phenomenon of emigration, from 1975 onwards, Italy gradually became a land of welcome for immigrants. In the three southern regions, foreign minorities mainly come from Eastern Europe, with Romania well in the lead, followed by Albania, Morocco and Asia (China, India). Foreign citizens account for 3.8% of Puglia's total population, 5.4% of Calabria's and 4.8% of Basilicata's.
Despite its central position at the heart of the Mediterranean, the south of the boot is not one of the preferred destinations for migrant ships, which mainly disembark in Sicily, Malta and Lampedusa. The secondary route to Calabria is mainly used by boats from Egypt. In the 1990s and 2000s, thousands of Kurdish refugees also landed here from the Turkish coast. The Puglia region, meanwhile, has seen a massive influx of Albanians crossing the Adriatic, but this movement has gradually diminished with the political stabilization of the country.
National language and regional dialects
In Puglia, Calabria and Basilicata, unless you're addressed in English because it's been detected that you're not from the region, you'll be spoken to in Italian, the national language.
Italian, a Latin language with a melodious, lilting sound, was a latecomer to formation, appearing as a literary idiom in the 12th century. For centuries, the Italian aristocracy and writers preferred Latin, Provençal and French. Gradually, however, a language was established and formalized, thanks to the work of authors such as Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. They used the Tuscan dialect, which is the origin of Italian as we know it today.
However, at the time of Italian unification, the young country was still a mosaic made up of several hundred dialects: each region defended its own, if not each locality! Linguistic unification was gradual, made possible by military service, the standardization of education and the media, first radio, then television. Today, dialects are gradually losing their importance, but remain an essential cultural and historical reference for understanding Italy. In fact, some of them are recognized as languages in their own right, such as Neapolitan and Sicilian.
Puglia's dialects can be divided into two main groups, each with its own phonetic characteristics: in the north and center, the Apulian dialects, which belong to the family of southern Italian dialects along with Lucanian and Campanian; in the south, the Salentine dialect, which belongs to the extreme southern Italian dialects, like Calabrian and Sicilian. Each of these groups offers a veritable panoply of local variants: for example, the inhabitant of Martina Franca speaks a dialect similar to that of Taranto, while his neighbor in Locorotondo, a few kilometers away, expresses himself in a dialect close to that of Bari.
Calabria also offers a wide variety of dialects, grouped together under the more generic term of Calabrian dialects. Here too, two groups can be identified: to the north, dialects derived from Neapolitan; to the south, idioms with strong similarities to Sicilian.
In Basilicata, the Lucanian dialects encompass all the region's languages and form four main linguistic areas: the Lucanian Apenninic area, around Potenza but excluding the main town, where there is a strange form of vowel change whereby, for example, porco (pig) becomes porchë in the singular and puorc in the plural; the Apulo-Lucanian area to the north and east, which has strong similarities with the dialects of Foggia and Bari; the Metapontine area along the Ionian coast, which, although of Latin origin, retains Greek influences; the Calabro-Lucanian area, whose dialect extends on either side of the border with Calabria, and features vocalism sometimes close to Sardinian, sometimes to Sicilian.
Ethnolinguistic minorities
The Arberèches are a community of Albanian origin that has settled in southern Italy since the 15th century, and is now spread across several islands in the south. In 1453, the Ottoman troops of Sultan Mehmet II seized Constantinople; the Turkish advance on the Balkans was inexorable, and Catholic Albanian communities fled in the face of the invaders. They were welcomed by King Ferrante of Aragon and allowed to settle in Calabria, repopulating areas abandoned by their inhabitants. Their settlement in particularly isolated villages contributed to the preservation of their culture. Further waves of migration led to the settlement of Arberèches in various regions of southern Italy.
The Arberèches speak a dialect derived from Albanian and influenced by Italian. They follow the Greek-Catholic liturgical rite, i.e. the Catholic rite in Greek. Arberche villages have two names, one in Italian, the other in Albanian. They are concentrated in the provinces of Foggia (Apulia), Potenza (Basilicata), Cosenza and Catanzaro (Calabria). The community also occupies several villages in Sicily, Campania, Abruzzo and Molise.
Grecìa salentina and Bovesia form two linguistic islands where the dialect is derived from Greek. Grecìa salentina is a territory of nine communes in the province of Lecce where Griko is spoken. Bovesia or Area Grecanica is located in the southernmost part of the province of Reggio di Calabria, around the village of Bova, and the dialect is called grecanico. Greek culture in the region was dominant in antiquity, with the founding of Greek colonies and the formation of Magna Grecia. However, the history of Grecìa salentina is more recent, dating back to the time of Byzantine domination: in the 9th century, Byzantium encouraged the settlement of its citizens to strengthen its hold on the territory. The origins of Calabrian Grecanico are more obscure: for some, the dialect derives from Byzantine Greek; others, on the other hand, maintain that it can be traced back to the Greek spoken in Magna Grecia. This theory seems to be confirmed by the presence of words from the Doric dialect (spoken in the Peloponnese and the islands in ancient times) and words from ancient Greek.
Occitan is spoken in the province of Cosenza, in the municipality of Guardia Piemontese, which was founded by Vaudois from Piedmont fleeing religious persecution in the 13th and 14th centuries. Guardia Piemontese Occitan, also known as Guardiolo, is spoken by just a few hundred people.
