An essential feature of the Italian linguistic landscape is the dialect. The word “dialect” in English describes the way English is spoken in a particular place, e.g. the “Midlands dialect” (UK), and the “mid-West dialect” (USA). In Italian, the word “dialetto” has a quite different meaning. Learn more about The meaning of the word “DIALETTO” in Italian.
Dialects are derived from Latin, as Italian is, and are more or less closely related to Standard Italian; but they are distinct languages, not varieties of Italian.
Florentine (the language of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio) won out as ‘Italian’ because it was close to old Latin, and offered a linguistic bridge between north and south.
So, when Italy unified in the 19th century, the new nation looked to the Florentine ‘standard’ as a national tongue.
Virtually everyone in Italy can speak standard Italian, the sort used in government, in education and in phrasebooks for foreigners. However, most Italians also speak a local dialect – half of them as a mother tongue – of the sort you’re unlikely to understand unless you were born and raised in the corresponding region, district or even town.
Each region today has its own version of Italian.
The differences in grammar and vocabulary between, for example, the Ladin dialect of the Dolomites and the Calabrese of the far south make mutual understanding almost impossible.
Today, around 70 per cent of Italians speak a local dialect alongside standard Italian, and dialect mixing is frequent.
As you might expect the closer a dialect is to the national border, the further removed it will be from standard Italian.
Three dialects, Sardo (spoken in Sardinia), Friuli (widely used in the north-east) and Latin (Trentino-Alto Adige) are separate languages by the federal government, such is their deviance from the Italian standard and a large number of speakers.
Dialects are used more by people with lower levels of education; they are used more in rural areas and in smaller towns than in large towns. Furthermore, dialects are much more “alive” in certain regions.
Both Italian and the dialects are being affected by their constant use by bilingual speakers.
The dialects are absorbing massive influence from Italian, in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary.
If it is true that the dialects in their traditional form are slowly dying, it is equally true that they are leaving their trace in the strongly marked regional varieties of Italian which draw so much from the dialect tradition.
Italy should be categorised as a multilingual country because a significant portion of the population routinely speaks both their native tongue and Italian. This also means that the distinction between Italian and the various dialects is frequently fuzzing up.
What’s next?
You might want to keep learning Italian online with these free resources:
Top 10 Italian Phrases That Make You Sound Like a Local
MOST POPULAR ITALIAN DIALECTS
VENETIAN
Dialetto veneziano – VIDEO
MILANESE
Dialetto Milanese – VIDEO
FLORENTINE
Dialetto Fiorentino – VIDEO
ROMANO
Dialetto Romano – VIDEO
NEAPOLITAN
Dialetto Napoletano VIDEO
SICILIAN
Dialetto siciliano – VIDEO
TUTTI I DIALETTI D’ITALIA – VIDEO
Enrico Brignano in una delle sue interpretazione dello sketch che lo ha reso celebre con i dialetti da Nord a Sud, isole comprese. (Enrico Brignano in one of his interpretations of the sketch that made him famous with the dialects from North to South, including the islands.)
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