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matteo tironi.
User deleted
Hi guys, today I'll go for another kind of article: a theory article.....yeah, I know, it will be a bit boring....
but before you run away in fear of having to take a caffeine drip after having read this, let me tell you this: have you ever been to Italy? If so, have you ever heard natives speaking so-called dialects and failed to understand them in spite of your top notch Italian? Well, this article will explain you why.
So, let's start with some history
a brief recap of Italy's history.
Up to 1000 A.C
You may wonder why should I talk about this damn history we all despise and wish not to ever see again once we're done with high school, and well, the answer is that every language is rooted within its people's history.
Would you be able to explain why English is the way it is without talking about the Anglo-Saxon conquest, the Hasting battle in 1066, the One-hundred year war and the renaissance?
No, you wouldn't.
Likewise, this goes for Italian. So, let's start, I promise I will be as brief and possible and I will spare you the worst parts.
So, our fairytale (if you think of it this way it will be more amusing, wouldn't it?) starts before the Roman empire's rise.
Northern Italy had been invaded by Celtic population and the locals had merged with them, while in The centre the Etruscans civilization flourished and got in contact with the other people of the Mediterranean (Greeks, Carthaginians, Phoenicians and so on), while in the south the local populations had to face the foreign invaders who settled in their lands (Greeks and Carthaginians).
Therefore, before the Roman conquer, there was no such concept as Italy, but in time, through long and bloody wars, Rome got to occupy most of Italy (actually some areas of the present Italian state would have been conquered only as late as 100-50 B.C, i.e. Much later than Spain, Greece and other countries).
Before Caesar's rule, however, Italy, the roman's homeland, included only middle-southern Italy , while the areas to the Rubicon's(roughly as north as Bologna) river and Sicily were not part of it till he decided to include them too.
During this process, the languages of the previous populations merged with Latin, creating very different varieties of Latin itself, pretty much as it happened elsewhere (if you travelled the roman empire right before its fall, you would have heard people speaking Romance languages in all its parts, including north Africa, Britain, the Balkans and so forth, but most of this Romance languages were wiped away leaving close to no trace on the following languages as the empire fell)
Italy, if considered as the territorial entity it is today, had been unified for about 600-700 years, but in 476 A.C, as they western roman empire fell, Italy was stormed with several raids carried out by various nomadic populations, until finally an unified kingdom under the Ostrogoths was settled.
They ruled for a very short period, because the Byzantine emperor was set on restoring the Roman empire's old glory, and therefore engaged a bloody war to reconquer Italy, but this conquer was rather ephemeral: just a few years after, a new Germanic population invaded Italy and brought war upon it once again.
This population, the Langobards, did however fail to conquer the whole peninsula, and from then on it would have never been unified until 1861 A.C
so, let's fast forward a bit on this part: afterward, the Church's state was established, the Franks chased away the Langobards and split Italy in three parts (north= Sacred roman empire, centre=Vatican, south=Langobards and Byzantines earlier, then it was conquered by Normans)
1000 B.C afterwards
are you tired already? But we're just halfway so, where should I restart from?
Ah, the empire. If you know at least something about the Sacred roman empire, you will know how it fought fiercely against Italian's comuni.
Yeah, because while in the southern and central areas, the strong power held by the pope and the Norman kings kept the cities from rebelling, the faraway power of the German emperor wasn't enough to prevent northern Italy from falling apart in a myriad of independent city-states.
During this period, every single city developed its own language, hardly influenced by the other cities' one.
In time, the biggest city states got to conquer the smaller ones, and as late as the end of the 14th century, Italy was split in 6 major countries: Milan, Florence, Rome, Turin, Venice and Naples, basically.
Of these, the one with the biggest cultural influence was Florence, because it was the homeland of many famous poets, such as Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio and so on.
Its cultural influence resulted in Florentin, Florence's language, spreading among the upper class of all the Italian countries, although the local language kept being used in normal situations.
Of course, these are still the major Italian cities, and the ones that can boast the greatest cultural heritage, because they used to be the capital of their own state, which were always fighting one another, by the way.
In the end, the continuous wars between this 6 major countries lead to a stronger and stronger foreign interference in our country's politics: Naples was conquered by Spain, Florence lost its independence and was assigned to a German dynasty related to the Habsburgs, Milan became part of the Habsburg's empire, Venice was conquered by Napoleon and later gifted to the Austrian empire, while the pope's election has been maneuvered by foreigners several times during our history (see the Avignon captivity for more).
The only country that managed to maintain itself independent was the Turin's state, the Sardinia's kingdom, ruled by the Savoy dynasty.
And it was the Savoy dynasty, that, exploiting the favorable historical conjuncture, managed to unify Italy in 1861.
well, unify is a big word: they just tried to destroy the older countries, but they couldn't change the division that settled in more than 1000 years of history.
Actually, back then, there was not even such language as Italian, so, instead of considering every area's peculiarity and try to preserve them, they decided that it would have been mre beneficial Italy's economic development (back then, all the other main European countries had already developed a lot, and Italy was late for the race to progress.) to pretend that Italy had always been just one country, so they took Alessandro Manzoni's novel, the Betrothed, as the model of our language. Manzoni itself was Lombard, but he had been influenced a lot by Florentine culture (let's remember than Florentine was the elite's language), so Italian ended up being 90% Florentine and 10% Lombard, with some loanwords from Venetian and Neapolitan.
Anyway, it was by no mean a common language: the first king himself couldn't speak it very well!
Anyway, the language was forcefully taught to kids once schooling became compulsory, but as people wouldn't take more than 1-2 years of schooling (barely enough to be able to read and write simple sentences), Italian didn't influence their spoken language, while educated people would learn Italian and speak it.
This created a big divide between the rich and educated people (mostly in the big cities of the north-centre) and the folk, making speaking Italian a sign of distinction: from then on, speaking the so-called dialects (as the Italian government nicknamed the regional languages), became a sign of ignorance, and this paradigm still applies today.
Anyway, this situation lasted for about 100 years, until the television made Italian spread throughout the whole country, and more and more people started forgoing their own language for Italian.
Nowadays, not all of the regional languages are still spoken.
Southern ones are far better preserved, because of a multitude of factors (less urbanization, lower education, less repression by the institutions and larger media exposure), but all of them are somewhat endangered.
Are they doomed to the bitter end? Sadly, at least the Northern ones, yeah.
As for me, both my parents were native Eastern Lombard speakers (my mother still asks me to translate some words from Lombard to Italian LOL), and I can understand it to a good extent, while I speak it very little.
Well, most likely my sons will hardly ever hear it, and my grandsons won't even know it had ever existed.
So yeah, it is doomed. Nevertheless, it has merged with Italian, become a true dialect, i.e. A variant of Italian created by the union of regional languages and Italian.
Let me give you some examples:
the sentence:
Yesterday I had to work, but now I'm just slacking off.
Would be
Ieri dovevo lavorare, ma oggi non sto facendo nulla in Italian.
And
Ier g'ire da n'da a laura, ma encö so dre a fa negot. in Eastern Lombard
Not close at all, if you ask me. I mean, in Spanish it would be (according to Google translate XD)
Ayer tuve que trabajar, pero hoy no voy a hacer nada
well, I wouldn't say the Lombard version is more similar to Italian that the Spanish one.
They just look like 3 different languages to me.
However, less and less people speak this language, but many people tend to calque Lombard expression in Italian, like:
Cosa sei dietro a fare? (the original would be “se set dre a fa?”)
Instead of
Cosa stai facendo? (English, “what are you doing?”)
now, this goes for all the regional languages, not just Lombard. They are slowly turning into what our politicians always expected them to be, dialects.
And in case you were about to say something like “hey, this is bullshit, Italian dialects are just dialects”, I could give you some proof of what I'm saying:
1)Unesco (not me), recognizes Lombard, Piedmontese, Venetian, Friulian, Emilian-Romagnol, Ligurian, Sicilian, Neapolitan and Sardinian as separate languages.
2)by definition, a dialect is a variant of a language that is mutually intelligible with the mother language itself. This would imply that a speaker of the standard variant should be able to understand a dialect, maybe with some difficulties due to the lexicon (like BE and AE), but there shouldn't be any change in grammar. This is blatantly false for Italian languages, because the grammar changes A LOT (as you could see in the previous examples)
3)if the regional languages were dialects, we should have some sort of evidence that show that they developed from Italian. This is impossible because all of them precede standard Italian, and because we have written evidence of their development that allow us to classify them as different languages.
Ok, so now I guess you are worried. You may be like “oh gosh, if so, all my Italian studies were useless!”
nope, because nowadays almost every Italian is a native Italian speaker (I am, for instance, in spite of my parents not being so), and everybody understands standard Italian anyway.
So, simply put, every Italian is bilingual, speaking both its regional language and standard Italian, and hell, we can switch between them so hella fast! When I talk with my mother, I just don't notice when she switches from Lombard to Italian and vice versa, so do people from other parts of Italy do in regard to their own language.
This does NOT mean that everybody speaks good Italian though, especially accent-wise.
In those areas where the Regional language is still preeminent, the Italian spoken there is worse.
That means, that if you want to study Italian in loco the way you learnt it on books, you'd better not go there. Honestly, I struggle to understand some of them myself XP
The places where Italian is spoken the best way, in my opinion, are the big cities in the north-centre, especially Milan (where the intense immigration from the south and other parts has wiped away any sign of its indigenous language), and Florence (Italian's actual hometown).
So the next time you hear some Italian speaking weird, rest assured, he will know standard Italian as well (well, most of the times XP), uh, and maybe English too but if your interlocutor is older than 30 don't expect him/her to be that good though....
I hope this article has given you a clearer insight of how Italy's linguistic situation actually is.
Many foreigners I've talked with don't even know these facts, and think of Italian regional languages as mere dialects just like in every other language, but this is not the case.
Just read the history recap I wrote at the beginning if you can't convince yourself.
Btw, if you will ever come to Bergamo, I could link you some funny Eastern Lombard-English translation videos to help you out XP
till next time, see ya
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introduction3: Italian's history, and Regional Languages, why? level1a bief look to Italy's history to solve the riddle of the 1000000 languages country. why the hell are there so many dialects and why do they differ so much from Italian? |
