Aetos, Messenia


Aetos is a village and a former municipality in Messenia, Peloponnese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform it is part of the municipality Trifylia, of which it is a municipal unit. The municipal unit has an area of 94.850 km2. In 2011 its population was 360 for the village and 1,915 for the municipal unit. The seat of the former municipality was in Kopanaki.

Languages and dialects

The homonymous village of the former municipality is home to the several hundred speakers of Aetobuneika, a descendant of and, morphologically, closest to the historical Doric Greek dialect. The village having, never, been under Ottoman rule and having kept its traditions and culture secret from the outsiders, managed to keep the dialect alive, besides the fact that there are no official status about it.

Vocabulary

Aetobuneika, on its core essence, retains the vocabulary of the ancestral Doric Greek dialect. However, since the village of Aetos was never under Ottoman rule, no words of Ottoman origin, actually, exist in the dialect. So, in order for the population to describe several items or food elements, a lot of new words where coined. Except that, it, also, contains a lot of Homeric Greek words.

Subdivisions

The municipal unit Aetos is subdivided into the following communities :