Italian dialects

Several years ago, when I lived in New Mexico, I taught a brief adult education course at the community college on “Italy for the Traveler.” The idea was, if you were going to take a vacation in Italy, you should know a little about it. I got into history, geography, culture, and food, constantly encouraging them to do outside reading. I began the first day by handing out a quiz, and the first question was “How old is Italy? (within a century).”

It was a trick question, of course, and most of the people in the class fell for it and guessed many millennia. My point was that Italy is in fact a relatively young country, created in the late nineteenth century from a bunch of formerly sovereign states spread around the boot. Among the issues of that time was the fact that the common language spoken in each of those states was different. So one of the first decisions to be made by the new Italian parliament was what would be the country's official language. After a battle between the Venetian dialect and that of Tuscany, Dante won over Goldoni and Tuscan became Italian, a real-life example of the adage that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy.”

Problem was, in the late nineteenth century the great majority of Italians didn't speak what was now their national language. Also back then, most Italians (nearly 80% in 1861) were illiterate, so one of the first projects of the new government was establishing a national educational system that included compulsory primary school. Classes of course were taught in Italian, so the system had the purpose not only of teaching literacy but of uniting the new country linguistically.

Which brings up the answer to a question you may have had when you started reading this: why the picture of Pinocchio? Well, the 1883 book by Carlo Collodi was used in grammar schools all over Italy and its importance in bringing the country together culturally cannot be overstated. The story promoted basic values like honesty and hard work, and because it was written in Italian, it was instrumental in spreading the national language.

It took a while. By the turn of the century – nineteenth to twentieth – literacy was still low, though improved, and the local dialects were hanging on. The big breakthrough for getting Italians to learn Italian was radio, and it was encouraged by the fascist government in the thirties through the installation of radios in party meeting halls all over the country. A couple decades later television was another huge boost since the programming of RAI, the government network, was in Italian.

But the use of local dialects was still common around Italy. I recall in the late seventies hearing working class people, like the janitor in my office building in downtown Milan, talking Milanese to their counterparts out on the street. My Italian was pretty good by then, but the dialect was totally unintelligible to me. I also remember watching a story on the national news in which some guy in an isolated area was interviewed, and they put up Italian subtitles on the screen as he talked. Of course there were, and still are, movements to preserve local language variations in Italy, which is a good thing.

I have tended to stay clear of issues of dialect when writing my books. I recall in one of the many books on the craft I read early on advising that new writers stay away from accents. She was talking about writing dialog, like having a character speak with a southern accent. It is very hard to pull off.

So in my mystery series I have avoided any dialog with dialect or accent. Of course it would be difficult anyway since I write in English.

Not that my protagonist Rick Montoya does not notice accents in the people he encounters, both American and Italian, and comment on it. He is a professional interpreter, so his skill in identifying accents is better than mine, which is fairly basic. I know that a Lombard accent is noticeably different from a Sicilian or Roman one, but getting more specific within a regional accent is more difficult if you aren't from those regions. I had this problem when I lived in Montevideo, Uruguay. I couldn't tell the difference between the Argentine Rioplatense accent and the Uruguayan. My Uruguayan friends of course could, but this gringo never caught on to the nuances of the two accents.

Interestingly, much of the Spanish spoken in Uruguay and Argentina, thanks to major migration from Italy, includes a lot of words and accents from the old country.

Perhaps that could be the subject of a future Substack.

As I usually write at the end of my posts, this substack is free, but the way you can support it is by getting one (or more) of my mysteries. Now there are nine of them and here's the complete list.. click here.