MAGNA GRAECIA

The use of the language in various fields

Education

A regional law of 1980 allows Greek-speaking school teachers or university lecturers to offer courses in the regions where the language is spoken, but there are no teachers or lecturers with sufficient command of Grico to be able to give such courses.

The Grico courses that are held in the schools of Bovesia are due to the initiative of the aforementioned Grico cultural groups. At a local level, the municipal authorities of Bova Marina provide a little economic help for the efforts of the Grico cultural groups to set up courses in the Greek language and training courses for teachers.

Although Calabrian Greek is not used as a classroom language anywhere, optional regional courses in Greek language and culture have been held for the past ten years or so in certain nursery and primary schools in Bovesia, thanks to funding from the regional and religious authorities and the EC. Although the number of pupils who choose to attend these courses is limited (fifty at the very most), there seems to have been a resurgence of interest in learning the Greek language and learning about Greek culture.

Greek is totally absent from the secondary curriculum. Only a handful of particularly motivated pupils attend the extracurricular courses offered by some Grico cultural groups. The same applies to the realm of technical education. The cultural group Jalò tu Vúa organizes Greek courses for adults. For some years now, thanks to European Community aid, Jalò tu Vúa has been organizing training courses in the Calabrian Greek language for teachers.

At the end of the eighties, the Jalò tu Vúa group formed a committee to lay down methodological standards for teaching Greek in each community and to draw up a Calabrian Greek grammar book for the schools in the region. The municipal administration in Bova published a Calabrian Greek grammar in 1979 and an informative pamphlet, La Glossa di Bova, some time later. As far as the Greek-speaking communities of Salento are concerned, there are also several educational publications designed for very young children.