A Brief History Of Spoken Italian Posted by Geoff on Oct 31, 2016 in Culture, Italian Language
Although Italian has existed for centuries as a standard written language, it wasn’t until the advent of television and the spread of mass education in the 1950’s that it became widely spoken.
Latino Volgare
Spoken Italian is a lingua neolatina (new Latin language) which has evolved from Latino volgare, the everyday spoken Latin of the common people back in the Roman era. Did you know that when Italy was unified in 1861 only around 2.5% of the population actually spoke Italian? In fact, even the new King, Vittorio Emanuele II, and Count Camillo di Cavour, Italy’s first prime minister, weren’t completely at ease in Italian, preferring French or Piemontese!
The Diffusion Of Spoken Italian
However, with political unification and the mobilization of troops during the First World War, Italian as a common spoken language became more diffuse, and by the early 1950’s it’s estimated that roughly 34% of the population spoke Italian rather than a regional dialect.
From the 50’s onwards, television played a major role in spreading the use of spoken Italian, another important factor being the mass migration of workers from Italy’s impoverished south to her industrial heartland in the north.
These days, of course, standard Italian predominates in most situation, yet i dialetti (dialects) are far from dead. Il dialetto generally tends to be spoken amongst family and friends, and is far more common in the provinces than in large towns and cities.
A variety of marracci for sale at a local market. Photo CC by Marco Bernardini.
Il Dialetto Da Noi
Here are a few words in dialetto that I’ve learnt here in Lunigiana:
il gradile, in Italian il seccatoio (chestnut drying barn)
la piagna, in Italian la lastra (stone paving or roofing slab)
la mastra, in Italian la madia (wooden chest of draws used for storing flour and sour dough, which opens at the top to reveal a surface for kneading the pasta)
il marraccio, in Italian la roncola, although I previously only knew it by the name pennato which is used in the Lucca area (a type of machete used by gardeners and lumber men)
Cultural Differences
One important difference that I’ve observed between Italy and Great Britain (my country of origin) is that in Italy it is region rather than class which determines how you speak. There is no actual equivalent to the Queen’s English.
In fact, many regional dialect are extremely different from one another, and some, such as il Sardo (Sardinian) and il Friuliano (Friulian), are actually classed as separate languages. Within the confines of the Italian peninsula, there are also several minoranze linguistiche (linguistic minorities) who speak completely different languages. These include German, in the region of Alto Adige, and French in Val d’Aosta.
Yet although there is no such thing as a truly neutral spoken Italian, Italians themselves tend to agree that the central Italian accent is the closest thing they have to a ‘standard’ model. And it is this accent that mainly tends to be taught to foreign learners.
Il Dialetto all’Estero
Many emigrants who left Italy in the post war period to seek a better life all’estero (abroad) spoke a local dialetto as their first language, having never formally learnt Italian. In fact, I’ve come across a number of Italian immigrants in the UK who are not comfortable conversing either in English, which they’ve never learnt properly, or ‘standard’ Italian. Often, these individuals only really feel at home when speaking with friends and relatives from their own region or village, sharing, as they do, a common dialect.
Indeed, when Serena taught Italian at Universities and colleges in Great Britain she often found herself teaching second generation Italian immigrants who spoke little to no Italian, having grown up hearing a local dialetto spoken at home that was quite redundant to them when visiting Italy.
E Tu?
Perhaps you yourself come from a family that emigrated from Italy. Did you hear Italian spoken at home, or a dialect? Did you learn Italian as a child?
Please share your experiences in the comments section.
A presto.
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Comments:
Rita Kostopoulos:
A month ago I made a presentation to the Italian Cultural Society on Italian dialects ; the audience was very appreciative since many if not all, knew dialects from their parents or grandparents who had immigrated from the South of Italy.
Chippy:
Molto interessante – grazie.
rosemarie:
My father spoke a dialect as he emigrated from the Val di Non in northern Italy. I never learned that dialect or Italian at home. We were not encouraged to learn as it was not “American” to speak a foreign language during my childhood.
Susan Jacoli:
I grew up in Alameda, California hearing The dialect Zeniese spoken in the home and amongst my parents’ friends. I feel fortunate to still be able to converse in Zeniese with my family in Italy.
Mary Shortino:
My Great-grandparents and grandparents spoke Sicilian when they didn’t want us to understand what they were talking about. I swore I would learn. Then I studied in Firenze for a year and realized I still would have trouble understanding them!
Antonina( Nellie):
Having been born in Sicily and immigrated to Canada
Upon returning to Sicily some 12 years later I only spoke dialect not Italian my cousins there thought it was funny
Now 40 years later in Sicily they are teaching dialect in
The town , poetry my freind Rita Ella grande poet of Termini Imerese writes in Dialect , and in Italian .
Ron Montecalvo:
I am 2nd generation American and I learned Italian from my grand parents (both sides) who originated from Puglia.
I studied the standard language and married a 1st generation Italo/American whose parents came from an area south of Rome. Though my grand parents and inlaws cold understand me, I must think about what they say in Italian.
Julie:
Yes we have just been to Sardinia and the owner of the agriturismo was telling me (in standard Italian) that in summer, there are lots of Italian expats who return to Sardinia from England or the US and who speak a mix of dialect, of which many words are now out of usage and English but little standard Italian.
Jean Roma Abrams:
My maternal grandparents came from Abruzzo and so my grandmother my mom and my aunts all spoke a dialect. My grandfather had passed by the time I was born. When I went with my mother to Italy for the first time in 1979, I remember her saying that she didn’t understand too well the Italian that they were speaking there. At that time, as a young person, I was not interested in learning the language. Now that they are all gone, I am studying Italian! Some phrases that I remember are cingua scud which I believe must have been cinque soldi? Also mezza paud which perhaps was maybe hai paura and of course pasta fazool for pasta e fagioli.
Jean
jan:
Davvero! E’ emigrato a 1902 agli stati uniti mio nonno e sempre diceva “we are in America now, and we will speak English”. I suoi 9 figli non sapevano mai che lui parlava solo genovese, non l’italiano. Ho capito solo dopo ho preso la cittadinanza e ho imparato la lingua italiana (un po’) che le parole ho ricordato da lui erano il dialetto.
Geoff:
@jan Molto interessante Jan, grazie per il tuo commento. Saluti da Geoff 🙂
Anthony:
@Geoff It is strange when you thought you spoke Italian but not really. Frist stop parents home town. Talking to everyone ,made a deal with bus driver to drop us at our hotel in Rome. Went to check-in and no one understood my Italian. Turns out i am a molisano and other than my parents village no one had a clue was I was talking about. As I found out each village has its own language.
June Radicchi:
There were signs posted on the East Coast that warned against speaking the “enemy’s language” when I was a baby. My parents had both come here to flee the mounting problems the fascists were causing their families. But, the Italian I heard on rare occasions was from Umbria and Perugia. What a beautiful language. I treasure my visits to Italy and its language.
Rosalind:
As regards dialects, I can understand the evolution of vocabulary from the basic Vulgar Latin and different words being favoured in one region over another, especially given the poor communications of the past. But there are some odd differences between the various languages/dialects which are puzzling.
For instance, when was it “decided” that the neutral “it” would be masculine in standard Italian and feminine in Corsican? How come the stressed vowel is different in, for example, “cantavAMo” and “cantAVamu”? Why do you say “a Roma” and we say “in Roma” for in/to Rome? And many more…
Too late for me now but I can quite imagine spending a lifetime studying the similarities and surprising differences in all the languages which stemmed from or were influenced by Latin!
By the way the Lunigiana word “gradile” reminded me of the Corsican poem about the start of winter which starts:
I grataghji fulighjinosi:
Anu e so faldette bianche.
Geoff:
@Rosalind Ah, the mysteries of etymology, one of my favourite topics. 🙂
Patricia:
My parents, born in the USA, spoke napoletana, the language of both families. But napoletana is considered a language, not a dialect, because there is a lot of literature and drama written in the idiom.
Robert Terranova:
Great summary of la Bella lingua. My parents spoke dialects. My mother’s family spoke Napolitan and my dad’s spoke Calabrese. They never taught me ot my brother to speak Italian but when I took Italian in college, I could barely identify the language. My maternal aunt told me that it was difficult for my maternal and paternal grandparents to understand eachother ??? She said it was because they were illiterate. I’m not sure that was true. At the age of 70 , I’m still trying to learn the language with a private teacher. It is frustrating . Thank you for your blogs. A presto
Geoff:
@Robert Terranova Grazie per il tuo commento Robert, e buono studio! A presto, Geoff 🙂
Della Chiesa:
Very true article, my parents came from Italy prior WW2. I went to Italy ,speaking the dialect of my parents. All my relatives could not believe that I spoke the dialect, and we’re very amused
Claire Harris (Daneri):
Sono cresciuto a San Francisco, in California, dove mio padre ha iniziato una impresa di costruzioni. Quando mi è stato chiesto alla scuola di scrivere la mia nazionalità, mio padre ha detto,
“Noi siamo americani! Nient’altro!”
Era il tempo della 2 guerra mondiale e gli italiani sono stati considerati “stranieri nemici”, soprattutto quelli italiani che vivevano nei pressi della costa della California! La mia povera nonna non era permettata parlare in Italiano!
Tommaso DeBenedictis:
My parents were first generation Italian Americans. My mother spoke the dialect of Naples but it was for her a second language. My father on the other hand did not learn English really until he went to school. He was fluent is Italian as a child and for him it was dialect taught to him by his parents and proper Italian taught to him by his uncle as he also taught him the mandolin and the violin.
Not until I was old ( 70 ) did I learn proper Italian and continue to learn more every day