Arvanitika was brought to southern Greece during the late Middle Ages by Albanian settlers who moved south from their homeland in present-day Albania in several waves.

[5][6] Arvanitika is today endangered, as its speakers have been shifting to the use of Greek and most younger members of the community no longer speak it.

[7] The name Arvanítika and its native equivalent Arbërisht[8] are derived from the ethnonym Arvanites, which in turn comes from the toponym Arbën or Arbër (Greek: Άρβανον), which in the Middle Ages referred to a region in modern Albania.

In the past Arvanitika had sometimes been described as "Graeco-Albanian" and the like (e.g., Furikis, 1934); although today many Arvanites consider such names offensive, they generally identify nationally and ethnically as Greeks and not Albanians.

[10] Arvanitika is part of the Tosk dialect group of Albanian, and as such closely related to the varieties spoken across southern Albania.

It is also closely related to Arbëresh, the dialect of Albanian in Italy, which largely goes back to Arvanite settlers from Greece.

Italian Arbëresh has retained some words borrowed from Greek (for instance haristis 'thank you', from ευχαριστώ; dhrom 'road', from δρόμος; Ne 'yes', from ναι, in certain villages).

Italo-Arbëresh and Graeco-Arvanitika have a mutually intelligible vocabulary base, the unintelligible elements of the two dialects stem from the usage of Italian or Greek modernisms in the absence of native ones.

In terms of "ausbau" (sociolinguistic "upgrading" towards an autonomous standard language), the strongest indicator of autonomy is the existence of a separate writing system, the Greek-based Arvanitic alphabet.

[15][16] However, this script is very rarely used in practice today, as Arvanitika is almost exclusively a spoken language confined to the private sphere.