Italian American Herald - July 2021

THE CHEF'S PERSPECTIVE Summertime, and the grilling is easy
PAGE 11
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JULY 2021
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By Jeanne Outlaw-Cannavo
“That’s not real Italian!” and “My nonna doesn’t say it like that” are protests that Italian teachers have heard from students studying the “official” language of Italy. Personally,
I never disputed their claims but simply explained there was a difference between standard Italian and what they heard at
home from their Italian-American relatives.
For centuries, Italy was divided into many states, usually under foreign rule which led to a great diversity of languages spoken on the peninsula. When the country unified in 1861, the new government leaders decided
to make Tuscan the official language of the country. When “standard Italian” was adopted as the only official language, several adaptations had to be made in grammar, lexicon and pronunciation. It was also compulsory in all acts of public administration and taught in schools, when no “standard Italian” existed, although it had been somewhat used prior to the unification in official acts, in schools and in universities.
However, this in no way changed the fact that outside of schools and government agencies the people of Italy continued to speak a variety of dialects across the regions as well as from province to province.
As a non-Italian by birth and a retired teacher of Italian, I have often been asked
if Italian dialects were just a subset of the official language or separate languages derived from Latin. Research and personal views of linguists often differ on this question.From my own personal experience, having both traveled throughout Italy and lived in Lazio and Sicily, I believe that no local language or dialect of Italy can be considered a dialect of “standard Italian.” Moreover, having to learn the local jargon of these two regions and other areas where I traveled, proved to me that the various dialects were being used as living languages.
Just imagine how absurd it would be
to consider the Florentine dialect, from which standard Italian derives, a dialect of standard Italian, when it was spoken before standard Italian even existed. One might even argue that standard Italian is a dialect
of Florentine. While I studied the “standard” Italian language in cˇollege, it wasn’t long after I first visited Italy that I was learning a whole different language. In fact, the first two Sicilian words I learned were iddu and idda, (lui and lei), meaning he and she in standard Italian. It wasn’t long before I began a whole
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Is Italian spoken here?
Why dialects remain vital languages throughout Italy
Vol. 8 / No. 7