Italian dialects

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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.[citation needed] However, Ethnologue, the registrar of the ISO 639-3 recognises them as languages of Italy[1].

Dialects of Italy by groups
Dialects of Italy by groups[2][3][4][5]
Languages and dialects of Italy[citation needed]
Languages and dialects of Italy[citation needed]

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[edit] 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; later on, this trend to marginalize people using dialects subsided, however dialects were still not used in public because new generations, as well as immigrants from other parts of Italy, could not understand them.

[edit] 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 where no immigration occurred, that is in the South and in the North-Eastern Italy, 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.

Use of dialects in literature is not inconsiderable, with plays of Carlo Goldoni in Venetian being a notable example. The various dialects of Italy are also spoken in parts of the world with significant Italian immigrant populations.

[edit] Dialects of Italian and dialects of Italy

Italian language
Dante Alighieri
Accademia della Crusca
Alphabet
Dialects
Grammar
Literature
Pronunciation
Profanity
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Dialects of Italian are regional varieties, more commonly and more accurate referred to as Regional Italian, with features of all sorts, most notably phonological and lexical, percolating from the underlying languages. 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 part of the collection of Dialects of Italy. Some of the "dialects of Italy" should thus be considered distinct languages in their own right by some scholars, and actually are assigned to separate branches on the Romance language family tree by Ethnologue and others academic works. The Italian legislation recognise only two as proper language: Friulian and Sardinian, in fact their regions are recognised with a special status.

A clear example of the differences and the confusion between dialects of Italy and dialects of Italian is the following. Venetian language has a very different grammar from Italian. In Venetian language (dialect of Italy): we are arriving would be translated «sémo drio rivàr», which is very far from the Italian «stiamo arrivando». The Venetian dialect of Italian (inflessione veneziana) would be «stémo rivando», which is how a Venetian would colloquially pronounce the Italian «stiamo arrivando». However, due to the unfortunate fact that, in Italian, the two different definitions are often expressed with the same term "Dialetti italiani", it is a common conviction that all of them are varieties of standard Italian. So, Venetian language it is popularly held by some to be a variety derived from standard Italian, and the same is true for well-known languages which show considerable differences in grammar, syntax and vocabulary: for example, Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Gallo-Italic languages.

For historical, cultural and political reasons, "dialects of Italy" have not yet been given an official status, nor have they developed a unified written standard; only three (Sardinian, Ladin and Friulian) are 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): although, all the varieties spoken in Lombardy all conventionally referred to as Lombard language.

[edit] List of varieties of Italian language

See also: List of languages of Italy

Corsican is generally considered to be related to Italian, and particularly to the dialects of Tuscany. [6][7][8][9]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Ethnologue report for Italy
  2. ^ Ali, Linguistic atlas of Italy
  3. ^ Linguistic cartography of Italy by Padova University
  4. ^ Italiand dialects by Pellegrini
  5. ^ AIS, Sprach-und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz, Zofingen 1928-1940
  6. ^ Harris, Martin; Nigel Vincent (2001). The Romance Languages, 4th ed., Routledge. ISBN 0-415-16417-6. 
  7. ^ "Italian Language", Encarta
  8. ^ Eurolang report on Corsican
  9. ^ Encyclopedia Britannica

[edit] External links

[edit] 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.

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