I think the future of Italian dialects will be difficultly predictable, but we know in the North-west are not very used, so they can be forgotten and discovered again, I’m not sure about that, but I’m sure is an heritage which our Italian native speaker we need to preservate.
In the industrialised regions of north-western city such as Piedmont and Lombardy, which are host to the two economic centres of Turin and Milan, the use of dialect is disappearing rapidly for various reasons. These include the fact that mass migration from other regions of Italy such as Apulia and Sicily means that the immigrants there and there children are not used to or interested in speaking Lombard for instance. Also the use of Lombard is seen as somewhat backward or even just simply ‘quaint’, something that ‘grandparents spoke’ but not ‘relevant’ to the modern world where standard Italian is spoken.
In Sicily, Naples and the south the local dialects there are seen as a symbol of regional identity.
This is an interesting article and it would be nice in subsequent articles or even possibly in the comments discussion to talk about how different the Latin language was in Italy during the ancient Roman era as well as some of the other languages that existed in the peninsula such as Etruscan and the relationship between them.
It’s also worth noting that some of the different dialects of Italian are still spoken amongst some of the diaspora communities of Italian immigrants in places such as Brazil.
The Etruscan language was a non-Indo-European language considered by linguists to be a ‘language isolate’ in that it has no language (as of yet) which can be identified to be related to it. The Romans of course had interactions with their northern neighbours, the Etruscans, and were impacted by them and some words in Latin are said to have originated from Etruscan. Latin itself is an Italic language along with Osco-Umbrian for instance, and Latin is of course a derivative form of an earlier language and is by no means the ‘pristine’, ‘pure’ original form of anything, though classical Latin could be considered a developed, polished form of Latin. The Italic languages are speculated to have emerged from a theoretical Celto-Italic language or language family which in turn is a subset of the Indo-European language family.
If this is correct then languages such as Latin would be distant cousins to languages such as Welsh.
Another major language that was contemporaneous to Latin in the peninsula during the ancient period was Greek. Some Italians are descendants of Greek colonists who established cities or colones in the peninsula much the same way that Greek colonists did in Anatolia, the Black sea and elsewhere. Ancient Greek was widely spoken in various parts of the Peninsula.
However the emergence of the Roman empire meant that Latin became the main language of the empire as it was the language of administration and retired soldiers who were given farming land by the Roman state as a reward for services rendered to the imperial state. These retired soldiers were bestowed with agricultural land across the peninsula and spoke Latin and used that to communicate with people whose native tongue might not have been that of the Latin of Rome.
Any language is constantly subject to metamorphosis and subsequent decay. The spread of a language depends, above all, on trade and military conquests. In the Roman Empire it was not uncommon for a citizen to speak at least three languages. There have always been official and spoken languages, with the consequent regional variations and adaptations, which end up becoming dialects when they are mixed with the original languages of the places they belong to. The Neapolitan dialect, at least the classic one that has its roots over the centuries, can now be studied, like archaeological finds, as an archaic language through the works of illustrious writers who have ventured into the creation of literary works in the vernacular. Languages evolve, but their cultural backgrounds remain available to those who are willing to study and learn them.
Great and precise article about the history of my mother language!
I think the future of Italian dialects will be difficultly predictable, but we know in the North-west are not very used, so they can be forgotten and discovered again, I’m not sure about that, but I’m sure is an heritage which our Italian native speaker we need to preservate.
In the industrialised regions of north-western city such as Piedmont and Lombardy, which are host to the two economic centres of Turin and Milan, the use of dialect is disappearing rapidly for various reasons. These include the fact that mass migration from other regions of Italy such as Apulia and Sicily means that the immigrants there and there children are not used to or interested in speaking Lombard for instance. Also the use of Lombard is seen as somewhat backward or even just simply ‘quaint’, something that ‘grandparents spoke’ but not ‘relevant’ to the modern world where standard Italian is spoken.
In Sicily, Naples and the south the local dialects there are seen as a symbol of regional identity.
This is an interesting article and it would be nice in subsequent articles or even possibly in the comments discussion to talk about how different the Latin language was in Italy during the ancient Roman era as well as some of the other languages that existed in the peninsula such as Etruscan and the relationship between them.
It’s also worth noting that some of the different dialects of Italian are still spoken amongst some of the diaspora communities of Italian immigrants in places such as Brazil.
The Etruscan language was a non-Indo-European language considered by linguists to be a ‘language isolate’ in that it has no language (as of yet) which can be identified to be related to it. The Romans of course had interactions with their northern neighbours, the Etruscans, and were impacted by them and some words in Latin are said to have originated from Etruscan. Latin itself is an Italic language along with Osco-Umbrian for instance, and Latin is of course a derivative form of an earlier language and is by no means the ‘pristine’, ‘pure’ original form of anything, though classical Latin could be considered a developed, polished form of Latin. The Italic languages are speculated to have emerged from a theoretical Celto-Italic language or language family which in turn is a subset of the Indo-European language family.
If this is correct then languages such as Latin would be distant cousins to languages such as Welsh.
Another major language that was contemporaneous to Latin in the peninsula during the ancient period was Greek. Some Italians are descendants of Greek colonists who established cities or colones in the peninsula much the same way that Greek colonists did in Anatolia, the Black sea and elsewhere. Ancient Greek was widely spoken in various parts of the Peninsula.
However the emergence of the Roman empire meant that Latin became the main language of the empire as it was the language of administration and retired soldiers who were given farming land by the Roman state as a reward for services rendered to the imperial state. These retired soldiers were bestowed with agricultural land across the peninsula and spoke Latin and used that to communicate with people whose native tongue might not have been that of the Latin of Rome.
Any language is constantly subject to metamorphosis and subsequent decay. The spread of a language depends, above all, on trade and military conquests. In the Roman Empire it was not uncommon for a citizen to speak at least three languages. There have always been official and spoken languages, with the consequent regional variations and adaptations, which end up becoming dialects when they are mixed with the original languages of the places they belong to. The Neapolitan dialect, at least the classic one that has its roots over the centuries, can now be studied, like archaeological finds, as an archaic language through the works of illustrious writers who have ventured into the creation of literary works in the vernacular. Languages evolve, but their cultural backgrounds remain available to those who are willing to study and learn them.