"Corfiot Linguistic Heritage: Exploring Venetian and Italian Influences"

Corfiot dialect is a unique linguistic variety of Greek, spoken on the island of Corfu, which has been critically influenced for centuries by Venetian and Italian. This work studies lexical borrowings, semantic shifts and grammatical adaptations on the basis of historical and sociolinguistic factors in the development of this interaction. The Venetian contributions came from centuries of government, introducing words connected to the administrative, commercial and urban life. Italian influences, on the other hand, stemmed from cultural and educational exchanges, contributing words pertaining to art, cuisine and day to day life to the dialect. The research utilizes case studies of individual lexical items to demonstrate that the Corfiot dialect functions as a linguistic archive, storing testimony of historical interactional events and accommodating local environments. The findings emphasize the importance of understanding language contact in order to establish cultural exchange, identity and language development.