What is Italian Dialects?

The Italian people generally indicates as Italian dialects all vernacular idioms spoken in Italy other than Italian and other recognized languages. As a rule of thumb, all Romance languages spoken in Italy are customarily termed as dialects. However, Ethnologue, the registrar of the ISO 639-3 recognises them as languages of Italy^[1].

Origin of Italian dialects

Many Italian regions already had a different substratum before the conquest of Italy by the Romans: Northern Italy had a Celtic substratum (this part of Italy was known as Gallia Cisalpina, "Gallia on this side of the Alps"), a Ligurian substratum, or a Venetic substratum. Central Italy had an Etruscan substratum, and the Southern Italy had an Italic or Greek substratum. All of that began as a diversification between the way to speak Latin (the official language of the Empire).

Due to the long history of separation in many small states and colonization by foreign powers (especially France, Spain and Austria-Hungary) that Italy went through between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and Italian unification in 1861, there has been ample opportunity for linguistic diversification.

However, most states used either the colonial language as the official one, or Latin in the case of independent Italian states (such as the Vatican). Rarely was the local vernacular used in official documents, and as such a formal grammar for most vernaculars was usually not established. Private citizens who could write would use vernacular as an informal way to write notes, as Leonardo da Vinci did, using Latin instead for more important publications.

The synthesis of an Italian language from the various dialects was the main goal in the life of Alessandro Manzoni, who advocated building a national language derived mainly from the vernacular of Florence, which had gained prestige since Dante Alighieri had used it in his Divina Commedia.

In a sense, therefore, the expression "Dialects of Italian" is inaccurate, since the dialects did not derive from Italian, but directly from spoken Latin, often termed Vulgar Latin: it was Italian that derived from the dialects, not the other way around.

Dialects remained the common parlance of the population until about the 1950s. With progressive increases in literacy, standard Italian became gradually accepted as the national language. Until World War II people of lower classes, who could not afford schooling or simply had no use for a national language, continued to use their own dialects in their daily lives. It is probably in this period that the stigma against using dialects in public arose, since it was a sign of low social status.

Current usage

The solution to the so-called language question that had troubled Manzoni so much came from television. Its widespread adoption as the most popular appliance in the Italian home was the single main factor in helping Italians to learn the national language. Roughly in the same period, many southerners moved to the north to find jobs. The powerful trade unions, to maintain unity among the workers, successfully campaigned against the use of dialects: this allowed southerners, whose dialects were not mutually intelligible with the northerners', to integrate using Standard Italian. The large number of mixed marriages, especially in large industrial cities such as Milan and Turin, resulted in a generation that could confidently speak only Standard Italian, and could usually only partly understand their parents' dialects.

As a result of these phenomena, dialects in Italy remain in use most strongly in the South (where no immigration occurred), in rural areas (where there has been less blending and less influence from trade unions), and among older speakers. Being unable to speak Standard Italian still carries a stigma, and even strongly pro-dialect political forces such as the Northern League rarely resort to anything else than Standard Italian to write or speak publicly.

Dialects of Italian and dialects of Italy

Dialects of Italian are regional varieties, more commonly and more accurate referred to as Regional Italian(s), with features of all sorts, most notably phonological and lexical, percolating from the underlying dialects. Tuscan, and Central Italian in general, are in some respects not distant from Italian in linguistic features, due to Italian's history as derived from a somewhat polished form of Florentine. Nevertheless, the traditional speech of Tuscany is rightly viewed as a collection of Dialects of Italy. The same categorization is true for well-known languages such as Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Gallo-Italian languages which show considerable differences in grammar, syntax and vocabulary, as also for the least-known language of the smallest town. Unfortunately, in Italian these two different definitions are often expressed with the same term "Dialetti italiani" leading to the conviction that all of them are varieties of standard italian (e.g. Venetian language has a very different grammar from Italian, still it is popularly held by some to be a variety derived from standard italian). The "dialects of Italy" should thus be considered distinct languages in their own right, and actually are assigned to separate branches on the Romance language family tree by Ethnologue and other academic works. For historical, cultural and political reasons, these idioms have not yet been given an official status, nor have they developed a unified written standard. Sardinian, Ladin and Friulian are, somewhat arbitrarily, considered as completely distinct languages. All the dialects of Italy exhibit internal variety, especially in Northern dialects, where the fragmentation in different states was harder and where there was isolation because of the mountains. For example Lombardy, when you can find at least three different and non-intercomprehensible linguistic groups (Western, Alpine and Eastern), also divided into six varieties, in which, then, there are differences in pronunciation, grammar and lexicon between a village and another (especially in Western Lombard): althought, all the varieties spoken in Lombardy all referred to as Lombard language.

A clear example of the differences and the confusion between dialects of Italy and dialects of Italian is the following. Venetian language, dialect of Italy: «sémo drio rivàr» (=we are arriving) ; Venetian dialect of Italian (italiano regionale di Venezia, or inflessione veneziana): «stémo rivando» very similar to Italian itself: «stiamo arrivando».

List of varieties of Italian language

See also: List of languages of Italy

• Dialect areas closest to Italian in features (see Central Italian)
• Tuscan dialect (the base of modern Standard Italian, but there are many differences) - Florentine dialect of Italian is one of the most important
• Umbrian
• Marchigiano
• Romanesco
• Laziale
• Languages which influence the Italian language in some regions
• influence of Piedmontese language (Piedmont)
• influence of Franco-Provençal language (Valle d'Aosta)
• influence of Ladin language (Trentino-Alto Adige)
• influence of Western Lombard (Western Lombardy, Eastern Piedmont, Swiss) and intermediate Western-Eastern Lombard dialects - Milanese dialect of Italian (do not confuse with Milanese dialect of Insubric) is one of the most important with Florentine one
• influence of Eastern Lombard (Eastern Lombardy, Western Trentino)
• influence of Venetian language (Veneto, Eastern Trentino, Julian March, Brazil)
• influence of Emiliano-Romagnolo language (Emilia-Romagna, Northern Marche)
• influence of Ligurian language (Liguria)
• influence of Corsican language and Gallurese (Corsica and Northern Sardinia)
• influence of Sassarese language (Northern Sardinia)
• influence of Sardinian language (Central and Southern Sardinia)
• influence of Friulian language (Friuli)
• influence of Neapolitan language (Campania, Abruzzo, Molise, Northern Apulia, Northern Calabria, Basilicata)
• influence of Sicilian language (Sicily, Southern Calabria, Southern Apulia)

References

External links

• Ethnologue - Languages of Italy
• Library of Congress ISO 639-2 Language Code
• Sito Veneto - Tradizsion e Progreso (in English too)
• Raixe Venete - Storia Cultura Tradisiòn e Progreso
• Neapolitan language introduction
• LinguaSiciliana.org
• Interactive Map of languages in Italy
• Accademia Napulitana
• Neapolitan on-line radio station
• Online weekly in Neapolitan
• Il Siciliano
• Lingua Siciliana Viva
• 330 Calabrian verbs cross-referenced into English and Italian
• Calabrian dictionary and proverbs
• eBooks in Calabrian
• Calabrian Proverbs,Riddles, Rhymes, Tongue Twisters, Jokes and Curses
• Calabrian phrasing (page in Italian)
• Calabrian poetry with Italian footnotes
• Gerhard Rohlfs: "Studi e ricerche su lingua e dialetti d'Italia"
• Umberto Zanetti: "La grammatica bergamasca"
• Dizsionario.org - Dictionary of Venetan and its varieties (venetan-italian)

Bibliography

• Maiden, Martin and Parry, Mair: The Dialects of Italy, London 1997.
• Maiden, Martin: A Linguistic History of Italian, London 1995.
• Hall, Robert A. Jr.: External History of the Romance Languages, New York 1974.
• Comrie, Bernard, Matthews, Stephen and Polinsky, Maria: The Atlas of Languages: The Origin and Development of Languages Throughout the World. Rev. ed., New York 2003.
• Grimes, Barbara F. (ed.): Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Vol. 1, 2000.
• Giacomo Devoto and Gabriella Giacomelli, I Dialetti delle Regioni d'Italia, Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1971 (3rd edition, Tascabili Bompiani, 2002).
• Andrea Rognoni, Grammatica dei dialetti della Lombardia, Oscar Mondadori, 2005.

See also

• List of languages of Italy
• Regional language
• Dialect
• Languages of the European Union
• European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages