Italian Language Blog
Menu
Search

Tag Archives: Italian dialect

Parliamo Romanesco! Posted by on Apr 18, 2017

Last week I wrote an article based on the poem La Margherita (The Daisy) by the Italian writer Trilussa. The poem is written in the musical Romanesco dialect which was Trilussa’s preferred means of expressing himself. If you have a reasonable grounding in the Italian language, Romanesco isn’t too difficult to read. You just need…

Continue Reading

La Margherita di Trilussa Posted by on Apr 13, 2017

“M’ama … non m’ama” (“he/she loves me … he/she loves me not”). In the innocence of our youth we pulled petals one by one from le margherite (daisies) hoping to discover whether the object of our heart’s desires truly loved us or not. Do today’s kids still do that, or do they now have an…

Continue Reading

A Brief History Of Spoken Italian Posted by on Oct 31, 2016

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…

Continue Reading

Pier Paolo Pasolini Posted by on Sep 10, 2014

Last week, at the 72nd edition of the Venice Film Festival, the American director Abel Ferrara (of Italian origin) presented his latest film: Pasolini. Interpreted by Willem Dafoe, the film portrays the final hours and tragic death in 1975 of the Italian film director, writer, poet and Marxist intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini, whom Abel Ferrara…

Continue Reading

La Lingua in Italia Posted by on Jan 6, 2012

One of the main aims of my blogs is to help you to understand the Italian language. It’s important to remember, however, that due to complex social and historical reasons Italian isn’t necessarily the first language of all Italians. There are, for example, linguistic minorities in Italy whose first language is German (in Trentino Alto…

Continue Reading