Silvia Marchetti’s Ozy.com piece on Italian dialects has a silly title [“Why Italians Are Giving Up Italian”] but an encouraging message:
All of Italy is seeing a renewed interest in dialects, a revival linked to a national — and greater European — identity crisis. “It’s a matter of territorial belonging,” says Andrea Maniero, a linguistics expert and resident of Nardò, where everyone understands the local lingo even if they don’t speak it. “The ones most lured to learning it are the youth, who are fascinated by the old speech of their grandparents.”
According to national statistics, half of all Italians prefer to speak in a dialect, whether it’s picturesque Napulitano (Neapolitan), Siculo (Sicilian), Francoprovenzale (an ancient Gallo-Romance language spoken in Alpine valleys), Fùrlan (Friulan, typical of the Friuli region in northeastern Italy) or Ladino (an old version of Latin) — just to name a few. In fact, Italy’s Union of Tourist Boards calculates that the country has some 11,000 dialects. The influence of Napulitano and Siculo is so strong that the iPhone offers them as language options.
To feed this demand, there are online courses; DIY books that teach archaic forms of Albanian and Greek that pirates brought to Italy centuries ago; and spontaneous get-togethers in crumbling castles to chat in Zeneize (Genoese, a dialect of the Ligurian language). A few kindergartens and middle schools in Naples have introduced courses on Napulitanamente (”the Neapolitan way”). In Rome, some curricula feature Romanesco, the colorful vernacular of the great 19th-century Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli.
(Of course “Ladino” should be Ladin in English, and god knows what Marchetti means by “an old version of Latin,” but what the heck, it’s journalism, not linguistics.) Folklorist and songwriter Andrea Baccassino says of his native Neretino: “My dialect is real, richer than Italian, which is a fake construction. There are untranslatable words with no Italian equivalent.” Which, yeah, is unscientific, but I’m glad dialect speakers feel that way. Thanks, Trevor!
“Ladino” is an entirely different semeto-romance language. I can understand how there could be confusion with “Ladin,” although there’s no reasonable way anyone could equate either with an archaic form of Latin.
My Quora answer on which Romance languages are called “Latin” or “Roman” and why.
And “archaic form of Latin” is obviously just a guess from someone who knows nothing about Ladin(o) but its name.
Archaic Latin? Mmmm.
Nonne hic fortasse sermo lingua XII tabularum fuisset?
At iurisconsultus profecto nec sum ego nec (ut commentatoribus illustribus hic respondentibus appareat) linguarum peritus.
Patronus si clienti fraudem fecerit, sacer esto.
I guess “Why Italians Are Giving Up Italian” is a catchier title than “Some Italians Still Speak Local Dialects”, but this article doesn’t offer any evidence of a trend towards greater use of dialects. It just reports that some regional dialects enjoy vitality, which is nice and all. Then it tries to connect this fact to Brexit and insinuate that standard Italian is in decline, which is unsupported and dumb.
That bit about Ladino is amazing.
And this is kind of weird: “When I asked for an espresso during my most recent visit [to Corsica], I had to repeat the order in Italian. French was too foreign for the bartender.” But if you say “un espresso”, you’re speaking both French and Italian. (Some French say expresso, but whatever.) Virtually identical phrases are used in Italian, French, Romanian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Articulated clearly, “un espresso” is all the words you need to order this beverage from Ushuaia to Chisinau. So I don’t get this. Maybe Corsican bartenders require complete sentences.
Re: si patronus … fraudem … sacer esto.
Consto. Et si pontifex religioni fraudem fecerit, anathema sit. 🙂
Antiqua lex. Novus rex. Quo magis mutantur, eo magis eadem restant.
@Brett: In Italian, Ladin is called Ladino – so the confusion is all the more understandable here. If we want to get really picky, though, we can dispute Ladin and Friulian (and Sardinian) being called dialects in this context, because they fall outside the Italo-Romance continuum.
Manios med fhefhaked Numasioi.
(always assuming that wasn’t fhefhaked.)
It does report renewed interest in the dialects from young people who apparently aren’t native speakers of the dialects (but only hear them from their grandparents).
Of course this doesn’t put Standard Italian in any danger. If it works out, it’ll be a return to diglossia. My grandpa found nothing wrong or unusual with using dialect in his prescriptivist rants at the TV about Standard German.
The “identity crisis” is of course massively exaggerated, but it’s real (it’s just not a crisis). The first half of the 20th century tried to simplify everyone’s identity to that of their nation-state: if you’re an Italian, you’re an Italian, end of story. Now that people get around more (in meatspace, on TV and more recently on the Internet), this attempt has failed, and people are developing a system of nested identities. On the one side, a European identity is emerging – it isn’t becoming any kind of patriotism, but it surfaces in comparison to Americans or Syrians, and more people than you’d think have an opinion on the Brexit (polarized into three camps, I think). On the other, people have noticed that they’re not the same as those strange other people from the other end of their country, and so the regional identities (themselves often nested) are resurfacing, and that’s what this article tries to be about.
I am informed, how reliably I do not know, that the EU has as a stated goal to make ‘regions’ more important and national borders less — and it did seem to be having some hope of success before it all became a battle to keep from descending into economic warfare again.
The metropolitan areas of København and Malmö are in fact officially part of Öresundsregionen, but this is mostly a forum for the local authorities on both sides to lobby to ease regulations that hinder mobility over the border, even managing to get the tax code changed — but it doesn’t get any tax money in itself and there is no governing body or local elections, and things like health care are still managed on national lines.
How does it work in the US in places like Kansas City, Missouri and its extension in Kansas? State lines aren’t as important as European borders, I know, but are there still two police forces, two main hospitals, two sets of utilities, different sales tax and business licensing boards?
I really don’t think the Arbëreshë community would agree that their language was brought to Italy by “pirates,” since their ancestors were mostly resettled mercenaries and/or refugees from the Ottoman invasion.
And at least some of the Greek dialects of Italy predate the Latinization of the peninsula. It’s impossible for people to get this kind of things right except if they’re really interested.
“And this is kind of weird: “When I asked for an espresso during my most recent visit [to Corsica], I had to repeat the order in Italian. French was too foreign for the bartender.””
RL, maybe what is going on is not incomprehension but rather recognition of a variety the bartender resents so he refuses service. The ‘r’ is probably the shibboleth. That’s pretty common, basically everywhere, but there is a lot of anecdata on that in Europe.
“How does it work in the US in places like Kansas City, Missouri and its extension in Kansas? State lines aren’t as important as European borders, I know, but are there still two police forces, two main hospitals, two sets of utilities, different sales tax and business licensing boards?”
There are separate everything in places like that other than hybrid transit or fire districts. The police people like to keep separate but these separate police departments are thick as thieves, uh.., have Mutual Support Memoranda of Understanding.
State lines are almost as important as country lines in the EU today, except for things like citizenship (and now we are seeing federal/state cooperation breaking down for immigration enforcement). But even Minneapolis–St. Paul, which is entirely in the state of Minnesota, has duplicates for almost everything.
Of course the internet helps enormously. Consider Stefano Agostino, who’s been turning out “sonetti e poesie in romanesco” at his site, http://www.romainrima.it/online/ for some time. I hope and assume that there are others out there for other regionals.
I’ve read/heard (memory fails me) that some of the non-Roman Garibaldini affected romanesco back in the day, which seems an interesting choice if linguistic as well as political unity was their goal.
All-
This article really obscures more than it enlightens.
First of all, “When I asked for an espresso during my most recent visit [to Corsica], I had to repeat the order in Italian. French was too foreign for the bartender.” The trouble with this statement is that, sadly, all varieties of Corsican are no longer being transmitted as L1’s, being replaced by French (In some instances this French is a local, Corsican-influenced variety, sometimes called “Francorsu”). I thus find it very difficult to imagine that a bartender in Corsica would find Italian more readily intelligible than French, especially since, as RL put it upthread, “un espresso” is practically pan-Romance.
Second of all, more seriously, the article (as others have pointed out) grossly overstates the vitality of Italian dialects: several of them (this is especially the case for Piemontese, Ligurian and Western Lombard varieties) are no longer being transmitted as L1’s in Italy and will thus be extinct (or nearly so) before the twenty-first century is over.
Third, the article fails to distinguish between two meanings of “dialect”. In Italy “dialect” normally refers to what can be called, technically, a “primary dialect”: that is to say, a variety which does not derive from the standard but shares a common ancestor with the standard: thus, Piemontese and Venetian are “dialects of Italian” in the sense that they and standard Italian (Tuscan) have a common ancestor (Vulgar Latin). This is to be kept apart from a “secondary dialect”, which DOES derive from some earlier transplanted form of the standard. Among the varieties listed by the author Romanesco, the vernacular of Rome, is such a secondary dialect: historically Romanesco is a variety of Tuscan transplanted in Rome starting in the late Middle Ages.
Within the English-speaking world this distinction between primary and secondary dialects is very visible in Scotland: Scots is a primary dialect, and Scottish English a secondary dialect. What makes the Italian situation messy is that primary and secondary dialects coexist in much of Italy, mutually influencing one another a great deal.
Romanesco, the vernacular of Rome, is such a secondary dialect: historically Romanesco is a variety of Tuscan transplanted in Rome starting in the late Middle Ages.
Huh, I did not know that! Are there any survivals of the earlier form of Italian spoken there? Thanks for an enlightening comment.
Within the English-speaking world this distinction between primary and secondary dialects is very visible
Indeed, every dialect outside Britain is a secondary dialect, but there has also been a lot of dialect mixing: American English is la lingua irlandese in bocca tedesca.
la lingua irlandese in bocca tedesca
Really? Is this a supportable claim, or is it just a catchy phrase?
Well, impressionistic. There are lexical features shared with Scots, Ulster Scots, and Hiberno-English, along with shared primitive characters like rhoticity. And I suspect the lesser tendency to reduce vowels (especially in suffixes like -tory) has something to do with people who learned English partly from books, of whom the Germans would be the longest-resident.
The metropolitan areas of København and Malmö are in fact officially part of Öresundsregionen, but this is mostly a forum for the local authorities on both sides to lobby to ease regulations that hinder mobility over the border, even managing to get the tax code changed — but it doesn’t get any tax money in itself and there is no governing body or local elections, and things like health care are still managed on national lines.
And of course they are united by the Bron/Broen crime series.
god knows what Marchetti means by “an old version of Latin”…
He’s probably trying to say Italian Ladino ‘Ladin’ is an old version of the word Latino ‘Latin’ (at least in the Northern Italian languages/dialects with intervocalic stop lenition).
My impression is different. Such things happen in words of three or more syllables, which are apparently too long for English. The British solution is to squeeze them into two or three syllables (by dropping the least stressed vowels altogether), making them acceptable; the American solution is to pronounce them as two words – “inven tory”, “secre tary”, arguably even “medi cine”.
German allows considerably longer strings of unstressed syllables.
We may say “labra tory” and “secra tary”, but not “medda sin”, no. The final vowel of the last is totally reduced.
not “medda sin”, no. The final vowel of the last is totally reduced.
That’s funny, that’s basically how I pronounce it. While the final syllable is ‘sn’ or ‘sǝn’ not ‘sin’, it’s still a separate syllable, making ‘medicine’ a word of three syllables.
John Cowan:
I remember hearing the difference in the American pronunciation of -ary, -ory, -ery attributed to influence from Noah Webster’s Speller, but this idea seemed implausible to me. I don’t think the difference is very pervasive, actually, but I may be wrong. The only other example I can think of that varies along the same lines is -mony in words with primary stress on the preantepenult, such as ceremony, testimony, parsimony.
There are also words where both varieties solve the “problem” of having three fully unstressed syllables in a row in the same way (such as pedagogy, which as far as I know always has secondary stress on, and an unreduced vowel in, the penult) or just tolerate it “as is” (as in celibacy and accuracy).
David Marjanović:
I would definitely say analyzing medicine as being pronounced as “medda sin” in American English is arguable. There are a great many words in English with two fully unstressed syllables in a row, like general and definite. As John Cowan and Bathrobe point out, most speakers with trisyllabic “medicine” have a clearly reduced vowel in the last syllable, or for other reasons feel the last syllable is fully unstressed.
It’s true that medicine has a two-syllable variant mainly used in British English but that doesn’t seem too connected to me to the type of syncope that occurs in dictionary etc. I’m not even sure if two-syllable “med’cine” should be considered the same type of syncope that occurs in e.g. “fam’ly” and “choc’late” (in both BrEng and AmEng). I’ve actually wondered if the disyllabic pronunciation of medicine might have been related in some way to the schwa syncope that occurs in present-day French médecine.
On the one side, a European identity is emerging – it isn’t becoming any kind of patriotism, but it surfaces in comparison to Americans or Syrians
I’d say it’s more of a Western European identity than a European one.
Hat: There’s plenty of work on the (primary!) dialects in the surrounding rural areas in Lazio, and some written documents in the older primary dialect of Rome (sometimes called, confusingly, “Old Romanesco”: confusingly, because Old Romanesco is a substrate to Modern Romanesco, not an ancestral form thereof) exist, and have been studied.
Incidentally, the Central Italian dialects (=centered on Umbria and Lazio) are much more diverse than I once thought: I used to think that they deviated from the standard chiefly in phonology, but this is not true: some of the more isolated rural varieties are quite deviant in their morphosyntax, indeed are in key respects quite unlike your typical Romance variety: one of them, for instance, could be argued to have a… four-gender system.
The whole notion of Standard Average European becomes hard to take seriously if, instead of the major standard languages of Western Europe, the smaller languages and more isolated primary dialects are examined…
I’m not even sure if two-syllable “med’cine” should be considered the same type of syncope that occurs in e.g. “fam’ly” and “choc’late” (in both BrEng and AmEng).
It is a different phenomenon. The “Fam’ly Syncope” is allowed to operate when there are two unstressed syllables in a row, C1 V. C2 V, and the sonority of C2 is higher than that of C1 in the following hierarchy: obstruent << nasal << liquid. It can happen whenever this condition is met, as in camera, battery, personal, ha’penny, Emily, natural, history, opera, Scarborough, strawberry, separate (adj., not v.), etcet’ra. In some words, e.g. every, the full trisyllabic variant has become practic’ly obsolete. But there are also words which individually preserve lexicalised traces of older types od syncope, no longer gen’rally applicable. For some people medicine and venison belong here, and comfortable, Wednesday are almost always comf’table, Wen’zd(a)y. Ant is historically a syncopated doublet of emmet. Placenames in Britain show how common this more general syncope used to be: Happisburgh /ˈheɪz.brə/, Wymondham /ˈwɪndəm/, Costessey /ˈkɒsi/ (these three are from Norfolk, where the concentration of strangely syncopated toponyms seems to be especially high). In really extreme cases like Cirencester (“Sissyter”) or Pontifract (“Pumfret”) even the locals at some point realised they had gone too far, so they settled for a spelling-pronunciation, but sometimes it was the spellers that gave up, as in Brighton < Brighthelmston < Beorhthelmes tūn.
Etienne: Haspelmath suggests these features as defining the SAE Sprachbund (slightly abbreviated here):
1) definite and indefinite articles
2) postnominal relative clauses with inflected, resumptive relative pronouns
3) a periphrastic perfect formed with ‘have’ plus a passive participle
4) a preponderance of generalizing predicates to encode experiencers, i.e. experiencers appear as surface subjects in nominative case
5) a passive construction formed with a passive participle plus an intransitive copula-like verb
6) a prominence of anticausative verbs in inchoative-causative pairs
7) dative external possessors
8) verbal negation with a negative indefinite
9) particle comparatives in comparisons of inequality
10) equative constructions (i.e. constructions for comparison of equality) based on adverbial relative-clause structures.
11) the verb is inflected for person and number of the subject, but subject pronouns may not be dropped even when this would be unambiguous (only in some languages)
12) differentiation between intensifiers and reflexive pronouns
It would be interesting to know which European languages, or primary dialects, lack these features. (The Celtic languages are outside the Sprachbund, and North Germanic and Balto-Slavic are peripheral members, but Hungarian is a full member.)
Etienne: The whole notion of Standard Average European becomes hard to take seriously if, instead of the major standard languages of Western Europe, the smaller languages and more isolated primary dialects are examined…
I find that perfectly logical. The regular multi-lingual communication through which grammatical and syntactical features have been exchanged on a European level is much more likely to happen through the Dachsprache — or through written texts. Conservative dialects, or conservative registers of dialects, are varieties that we already know that for some reason or other have been resistant to influence of the Dachsprache. That may also leave them “outside the Sprachbund”.
(Finnish is either not a member or a very marginal one.)
Ooh, a wonderful example of both! 🙂 It didn’t come to my mind because the form I’m used to is of course lab.
Yes and no. East of the Iron Curtain it’s much thinner on the ground, but it’s spreading.
Intriguing. Can you tell us more? 🙂
Oh, so is it cognate with Ameise after all?
Well, Haspelmath has also written much about how SAE is a matter of concentric circles, with northern French and southern German generally sharing the most features (even beyond this list: e.g., the perfect of feature 3 becoming the default or only past tense, and… I don’t know if Alemannic retains “both”; French and many Bavarian-Austrian dialects have lost it and resort to “all two”). English lacks feature 7, because it doesn’t have enough of a distinguishable dative left; Czech is halfway to developing definite articles…
Oh, so is it cognate with Ameise after all?
Yes. It’s related to mites too. It comes from PGmc. *ē-mait-ijōn- (more or less ‘she that bites out/away’). This gave OHG āmeiza on the one hand, and OE ǣmet(t)e on the other. The further evolution of ants in English dialects was multidirectional, depending on the relative chronology of vowel shifts and syncope. If the medial -e- was lost early, ǣ was shortened before the cluster /mt/ and merged into ME /a/, yielding am(p)te, ante > ant. Otherwise ǣ was raised to ME /ɛː/, then affected by trisyllabic shortening: ę̄mete > emete > emmet.
What about pissmere?
English lacks feature 7, because it doesn’t have enough of a distinguishable dative left
We have a perfectly fine periphrastic and positional dative, we just don’t like *Mama washed me the hair or *Mama washed the hair to me any more, though back in the late 9C we had no problem with þa sticode him mon þa eagan ut ‘then someone gouged him the eyes out’. Perhaps the external possessor started to look too much like an EModE ethical dative (now also lost), in which Mary washed me the hair ‘Mary washed someone’s hair [her own or mine] for me’ would be equally salient. In any case, the pont of the twelve features is not that every language in the Sprachbund has them, but that only a few scattered languages outwith the group have them. There are additional common but not really diagnostic features at WP.
There is a long passage in Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds that is full of external dative possessors; they don’t mirror anything in Irish, and who knows where he got them from:
We get further “the bog-cloth drawers to his fork”, “the gutted jacket to his back”, “the knees and calves to him”, “the nose” and later “the mouth to his white wheyface”, “the caverns to the butt of his nose”, “the dark hollow to each tooth”, and even “the colour to each great eyeball”, but on the other hand “the watchful host of his honey-yellow teeth”, where host is not a body part, embedded among them. All of this is certainly not English, not even Hiberno-English, but it is perfectly clear.
pissmere
Well, piss is transparent, though formic acid does not quite smell like urea, and mire (not mere) < ON maura, with reflexes in the North Germanic languages.
Yes and no. East of the Iron Curtain it’s much thinner on the ground, but it’s spreading.
My impression is actually that what little there is of it has been waning these last few turbulent years.
But I was actually thinking of the way Western Europeans view their European identity. By and large, the rest of us aren’t really included.
Juha: What about pissmere?
ME mīre. A certain 11th c. Danish jarl whose name was Þurcytel was nicknamed Mȳranhēafod (Thorkettle the Ant-head), and this is the only attestation of OE mȳre. Whether native of borrowed from Old Norse, the word reflects *meurijōn-, with cognates in Scandinavian and Crimean Gothic, and has a variant with a different apophonic grade, *mauraz. These forms must have originated by metathesis from pre-Germanic *morw-o-s m., *merw-ih₂- f., with almost exact cognates in Slavic, Iranian and Celtic. There’s a curious permutation of all the consonants of the stem in Sanskrit vamrá- m., vamrī́ f., an assimilation in Gk. μύρμηξ, and an assimilation followed by a dissimilation in Lat. formica < *mormikā < *morwikā
Thorkettle the Ant-head
My day is made.
Ah yeah. That is certainly mostly true.
Piotr, thanks a lot!
I like the Swedish myrornas krig, “the ants’ war”.
I’ve never given much thought to the PIE ‘ant’ word, but this discussion has made me look again at the cognate sets and I think there’s enough evidence to posit a PIE acrostatic stem,*móru-/*méru-, and some interesting derivations (rather than the usual blah-blah-blah about tabooistic distortion and arbitrary variation in PIE). It may even be publishable.
David: in many Central Italian dialects you have, in addition to the masculine and feminine, two separate neuter genders: a “Romanian”-type (AKA ambigeneric) neuter, which triggers masculine agreement in the singular and feminine agreement in the plural (although some of the nouns themselves belonging to this gender often have a distinctive plural ending, derived either from Latin /a/ -cf. templum/templa- or from Latin /ora/, -cf. tempus/tempora) and a mass neuter gender, which lacks plurals. In one village dialect you have the following forms of the definite article (I’m quoting from memory here, so please don’t cite/use this): masculine: singular /ju/ plural /i/, feminine singular /la/ plural /le/, “ambigeneric neuter”: singular /ju/ plural /le/, and mass neuter: /lo/.
Agreement involves more than mere articles, and indeed some of these dialects are very interesting for scholars interested in past participle agreement, because these dialects often have separate mass neuter and masculine singular forms of the past participle.
Oh, and just to make things more interesting a FEW of these dialects could be claimed to have a fifth gender, made up of masculine nouns ending in /a/ and whose plural is in /i/: in these dialects these words, instead of simply making up a subclass of masculine nouns triggering (singular and plural) masculine agreement in the NP (as is the case with Standard Italian), trigger feminine agreement in the singular and masculine agreement in the plural: a sort of mirror image of the neuter “ambigeneric” gender.
Finally, I guess I should leave this remark on the other thread, but I am feeling lazy today: you had mentioned the remarkable fact that it is in Estonia that we find the highest concentration of Yamnaya genes: well, have a look at this-
http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust258/sust258_janhunen.pdf
Especially page 74. It IS nice when everything fits together, isn’t it?
Only one way to find out! 🙂
Fascinating.
Exactly.
nuclear and nuke ular?
^ What about it?
3 years ago I participated in some confusion about the pronunciations of medicine. I didn’t keep in mind that I don’t have the rabbit-abbot merger: all unstressed vowels of medicine, whether one or two, are /ɪ/ for me.
Putting the sin in medicine.
Piotr Gąsiorowski (May 17, 2017) on the mire ‘ant’ of pismire: “ME mīre. A certain 11th c. Danish jarl whose name was Þurcytel was nicknamed Mȳranhēafod (Thorkettle the Ant-head), and this is the only attestation of OE mȳre.”
Alas, the OED’s (2002) etymology for †mire reinterprets Ant-head as the more prosaic Horse-head:
However, the Middle English Dictionary does cite four people with (le) Mire/Myre as a surname in the 1200s and 1300s.