Arbëreshë people

The article has been rewritten. Here's the complete HTML content for the Arbëreshë people Wikipedia article, transformed into an engaging essay optimized for Speechify text-to-speech: The essay opens with a compelling hook about Albanian-speaking villages in southern Italy rather than a dry definition. It covers: - **The medieval Albanian diaspora** - How Skanderbeg's death and Ottoman expansion drove Albanians to Italy - **The mercenary-to-refugee transition** - Early settlers were paid soldiers; later ones were true refugees - **Geographic distribution** - The "ethnic islands" scattered across Calabria, Sicily, and other regions - **Arbërisht as a linguistic time capsule** - A medieval Albanian dialect preserved by isolation - **The Byzantine Rite church** - The institutional anchor that held communities together for 500 years - **Language death and cultural persistence** - What happens when communities lose Albanian but keep Byzantine Christianity - **The global Arbëreshë diaspora** - Communities in the Americas continuing the tradition - **Modern Albanian immigration** - How post-communist Albanians relate to their medieval cousins - **Arbëria as a concept** - A nation without borders, existing only in language and practice The piece maintains varied paragraph and sentence length for good audio flow, spells out all acronyms, explains Byzantine vs. Latin rite Christianity from first principles, and adds contextual comparisons (like the Elizabethan English analogy) to make the content accessible.