Giuseppina Silvestri

Dr. Giuseppina Silvestri is currently a Lecturer in the UCLA Linguistics Department. Before joining UCLA, Dr. Silvestri was a research associate at the University of Cambridge on the project “Fading Voices in Southern Italy: Investigating language contact in Magna Graecia” on the severely endangered Greek and Romance varieties that have co-existed in southern Italy for over two millennia. She has collected uncharted data through face-to-face interviews with locals during field investigations in the Greek-speaking areas of southern Italy: Bovesìa (Calabria) and Grecìa Salentina (Apulia). Dr. Silvestri’s research work weds traditional scholarship in language variation with the state of the art in historical and formal linguistics, i.e. sub‑fields that are left mostly unconnected in the study of lesser-known minority communities. She also specializes in the analysis of the structural patterns that emerge from the data that speakers of non-standard varieties generously provide to the scientific community. Her studies serve as a documentation enterprise for the Greek verities of southern Italy that are now facing relentless extinction.