Regional Italian
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Regional Italian (Italian: italiano regionale, pronounced [itaˈljaːno redʒoˈnaːle]) is any regional[note 1] variety of the Italian language.
Such
The various forms of Regional Italian have phonological,
Regional Italian and the languages of Italy
The difference between Regional Italian and the actual languages of Italy, often imprecisely referred to as dialects, is exemplified by the following: in Venetian, the language spoken in Veneto, "we are arriving" would be translated into sémo drio rivàr, which is quite distinct from the Standard Italian stiamo arrivando. In the regional Italian of Veneto, the same expression would be stémo rivando or siamo dietro ad arrivare. The same relationship holds throughout the rest of Italy: the local version of standard Italian is usually influenced by the underlying local language, which can be very different from Italian with regard to phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary.[1][2] Anyone who knows Standard Italian well can usually understand Regional Italian quite well, while not managing to grasp the regional languages.[3]
Origin
Many contemporary Italian regions already had different
Even though the
The popular diffusion of a unified Italian language was the main goal of Alessandro Manzoni, who advocated for a single national language mainly derived from "cultured" Florentine language.[9] Having lived in Paris for many years, Manzoni had noticed that French (defined as the capital's dialect) was a very lively language, spoken by ordinary people in the city's streets.[10] On the other hand, the only Italian city where even the commoners spoke something similar to literary Italian was Florence, so he thought that Italians should choose Florentine as the basis for the national language.[10]
The
Italian as a spoken language was born in two "linguistic labs"[12] consisting of the metropolitan areas in Milan and Rome, which functioned as magnets for internal migration. Immigrants were only left with the national language as a lingua franca to communicate with both the locals and other immigrants. After unification, Italian started to be taught at primary schools and its use by ordinary people increased considerably, along with mass literacy.[13] The regional varieties of Italian, as a product of standard Italian mixing with the regional languages, were also born.[14]
The various regional languages would be retained by the population as their normal means of expression until the 1950s, when breakthroughs in literacy and the advent of TV broadcasting made Italian become more and more widespread, usually in its regional varieties.[15]
Characteristics of regional Italian
Establishing precise boundaries is very difficult in linguistics, and this operation at the limit can be accomplished for individual phenomena (such as the realization of a sound), but not for all of them: it is necessary to proceed in part by abstractions. In general, an
This imaginary line is used here to define not only a boundary between dialect groups, but also between Northern regional Italian on the one hand and Central and Southern regional Italian on the other.[16] Other well-defined areas are the Tuscan, the Extreme Southern Italian (comprising the peninsular part of Calabria, Salento and Sicily), and finally the Sardinian ones.[16]
Based on borders like La Spezia-Rimini, here are the most well-identified groups of regional Italian.
Northern Italy
Northern regional Italian is characterized by a different distribution of the open and closed e and o (
There is also a strong tendency to pronounce all the e's before a nasal consonant as closed (usually when the nasal consonant is in the same syllable of the e) so that /ɛ/ becomes /e/. Sempre (always) is pronounced as [ˈsempre] in Northern Italy while the standard pronunciation is [ˈsɛmpre], The only exceptions being the words that end in -enne and -emme A characteristic of the North in opposition to the South is the almost always voiced ([z]) consonant in intervocalic position, whereas in the south it is always voiceless: [ˈkɔːza] vs. [ˈkɔːsa]. Also in opposition to the south, the north is characterized by the reduction of phonosyntactic doubling at the beginning of the word (after vowels) and the almost total abandonment of the preterite tense in verb forms as it is not present in the majority of Gallo-italic languages (they are replaced by the present perfect).
Sometimes, for older speakers, northern varieties lack geminated consonats (see gemination), especially in Veneto. The lack of the gemination standardly found in combinations of prepositions + articles (e.g. alla, dello, sull' etc.) is very widespread in casual speech, resulting in "sull'albero" sounding like [suˈlalbero] in contrast with the standard pronunciation [sulˈlalbero].
The consonats /ʃ, tʃ, dʒ/ are
Final N's (even though they're not usually found in words with an Italian origin) are usually pronounced as
In some cases, certain unstressed vowels may be pronounced more subtly or reduced in Northern Italian varieties compared to standard Italian. One example is the pronunciation of the suffix -ano for conjugating a first conjugation verb (-are) to a third plural person (they), which most of the times is phonetically realized as [-ɐno]
Widespread use of determiners before feminine names (la Giulia) is also noted in almost all the north while the determiner coupled with male names (il Carlo) is typical of the Po Valley.
In the northern vocabulary words like anguria (also common in Sardinia and Sicily), which means "watermelon", instead of cocomero, bologna for mortadella (but not everywhere), piuttosto che ("rather than") in the sense of "or" and not "instead", etc. are in use. The last, in particular, is a custom that has begun to spread also in other areas of Italy, stirring up linguistic concern,[17] as it is used with a semantic sense in contrast to that of standard Italian.
Tuscany
In Tuscany and especially in Florence, the Tuscan gorgia is very well known. That is, the lenition of the occlusive consonants in the post-vocalic position, including at the beginning of the word if the previous word ends up by vowel: la casa "the house" [la ˈhaːsa], even to its total disappearance. Also phonological in nature are forms without the diphthong uo of Standard Italian (ova, scola, bona, foco instead of uova, scuola, buona, fuoco), while in the syntax a tripartite system of demonstrative adjectives is in use: questo ("this") to indicate something close to the speaker (first person), codesto (lost in other varieties) for something close to the contact person (second person), or quello "that" for something far from both (third person). A Tuscan stereotype is use of forms resembling the impersonal for the first person plural: (noi) si va instead of noi andiamo ("we are going"), past tense (noi) si è andati, and use of te rather than tu as second person singular subject pronoun: Te che fai stasera? rather than Tu che fai stasera? ("What are you doing tonight?"). Also typical of several areas including Tuscany is the use of the article before a female given name (la Elena, la Giulia); such use passed from Tuscany to other regions when used before the surname of well-known people, particularly of the past (il Manzoni). In the vocabulary there is the use of spenge instead of spegne ("extinguishes") or words like balocco instead of giocattolo ("toy"), busse instead of percosse or botte ("beatings"), rena instead of sabbia ("sand"), cencio instead of panno ("cloth").
The Tuscan historical dialects (including Corsican) belong to the same linguistic system as Italian, with few substantial morphological, syntactic or lexical differences compared to the standard language. As a result, unlike further from Tuscany in Italy, there are no major obstacles to mutual intelligibility of the local Romance languages and Regional Italian.
Central Italy, Southern Italy and Sicily
Central and Southern regional Italian is characterized by the usage of the
In continental Southern Italy there is a different distribution of closed and open vowels (The pronounce "giòrno" with an open o is very widespread in
Another characteristic of regional Italian varieties in central and southern Italy is
Sardinia
Based on the significant linguistic distance between the
Sardinianised Italian is marked by the prevalence, even in common speech, of the verb's inversion, following rules of Sardinian (and Latin) but not Italian, which uses a
As mentioned earlier, a significant number of Sardinian and other local loanwords (be they Italianised or not) are also present in regional varieties of Italian (e.g. porcetto from the Sardinian porcheddu / porceddu, scacciacqua from the Sardinian parabba / paracua "raincoat", continente "Mainland" and continentale "Mainlander" with reference to the rest of the country and its people as well,[20][21] etc.).
Some words may even reflect ignorance of the original language on the speaker's part when referring to a singular noun in Italian with Sardinian plurals, due to a lack of understanding of how singular and plurals nouns are formed in Sardinian: common mistakes are "una seadas", "un tenores", etc.
Regarding phonology, the regional Italian spoken in Sardinia follows the same five-vowel system of the Sardinian language without length differentiation, rather than the standard Italian seven-vowel system. Metaphony has also been observed: tonic e and o ([e, o]) have a closed sound whenever they are followed by a closed vowel (i, u), and they have it open if they are followed by an open one (a, e, o). Hypercorrection is also common when applying the Italian rule of syntactic gemination; intervocalic t, p, v, c are usually elongated. Intervocalic /s/ voicing is the same as in Northern Italy, that is [z].
See also
Notes
- ^ "Regional" in the broad sense of the word; not to be confused with the Italian endonym regione, for Italy's administrative units.
- ^ Notwithstanding their linguistic status, most of the actual languages of Italy (with particular reference to the non-recognised ones) are called "dialects" (dialetti) by the general population.
References
- ^ G. Berruto (2012). Sociolinguistica dell'italiano contemporaneo (in Italian). Carocci. p. 13..
- ^ "Italiano regionale" (in Italian). Retrieved 7 June 2022.
- ^ "L'italiano regionale" (PDF) (in Italian). Retrieved 7 June 2022.
- ^ "Evoluzione del latino e nascita delle lingue romanze in Europa" (in Italian). Retrieved 7 June 2022.
- ^ Marazzini, Breve storia della lingua italiana, 2004, cit., p. 54. (In Italian)
- ^ "La Sardegna agli Asburgo che la cedono ai Savoia ed inizia la lunga dominazione sabauda" (in Italian). Retrieved 7 June 2022.
- ^ ""Prose della volgar lingua" di Pietro Bembo: introduzione all'opera" (in Italian). Retrieved 7 June 2022.
- ^ "La lingua dei còrsi: il volto di un'isola" (in Italian). Retrieved 7 June 2022.
- ^ "Ottocento, lingua dell'" (in Italian). Retrieved 8 June 2022.
- ^ a b "Manzoni, Alessandro" (in Italian). Retrieved 8 June 2022.
- ^ "Una di lingua. Un percorso espositivo sulla lingua italiana negli anni dell'unità d'Italia" (in Italian). Retrieved 8 June 2022.
- ^ Tullio De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell'Italia unita, Bari, Laterza, 1963.
- ^ "Scolarizzazione" (in Italian). Retrieved 8 June 2022.
- ^ "Le varietà dell'italiano" (PDF) (in Italian). Retrieved 8 June 2022.
- ^ "Tv, dalla lingua educativa alla lingua Educational" (in Italian). Retrieved 8 June 2022.
- ^ a b c "THE LA SPEZIA-RIMINI LINE: WHERE ITALIAN VARIETIES COLLIDE". Retrieved 10 June 2022.
- ^ "Uso di piuttosto che con valore disgiuntivo - Consulenza Linguistica - Accademia della Crusca". accademiadellacrusca.it. Retrieved 2022-02-13.
- ^ "L'italiano nelle regioni in "L'Italia e le sue Regioni"". www.treccani.it (in Italian). Retrieved 2022-02-13.
- ^ Retorica e italiano regionale: il caso dell'antifrasi nell'italiano regionale sardo, Cristina Lavinio, in Cortelazzo & Mioni 1990
- ^ Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, UTET, Torino, V. III, p.654
- ^ Antonietta Dettori, 2007, Tra identità e alterità. "Continente" e "continentale" in Sardegna, in Dialetto, memoria & fantasia, Atti del Convegno (Sappada / Plodn, 28 giugno - 2 luglio 2006), a cura di G. Marcato, Padova, Unipress, pp. 393-403.
Bibliography
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- Berruto, Gaetano: Sociolinguistica dell'italiano contemporaneo, Rome: Carocci, 2012.
- Bruni, Francesco: L'italiano nelle regioni, Turin: UTET, 1992.
- Canepari. Luciano. 1983. Italiano standard a pronunce regionali. Padova: CLEUP.
- Cardinaletti, Anna and Nicola Munaro, eds.: Italiano, italiani regionali e dialetti, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2009.
- Comrie, Bernard, Matthews, Stephen and Polinsky, Maria: The Atlas of Languages: The Origin and Development of Languages Throughout the World. Rev. ed., New York 2003.
- Cortelazzo, Manlio and Carla Marcato, Dizionario etimologico dei dialetti italiani, Turin: UTET libreria, 2005, ISBN 88-7750-039-5.
- Devoto, Giacomo and Gabriella Giacomelli: I dialetti delle regioni d'Italia, Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1971 (3rd edition, Tascabili Bompiani, 2002).
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- Grimes, Barbara F. (ed.): Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Vol. 1, 2000.
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- Haller, Hermann W.: The Hidden Italy: A Bilingual Edition of Italian Dialect Poetry, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986.
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- Maiden, Martin and Parry, Mair, eds.: The Dialects of Italy, London: Routledge, 1997.
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