Page 5 - Italian American Herald - July 2021

FROM THE COVER
new learning process.
Regions of other countries which became
part of the new nation of Italy often kept some other language spoken locally as their “standard” language. This remains true
to this day, especially in Sardinia, the area around Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trentino- Alto Adige sometimes referred to as South Tyrol. Although Italian became an official language in many of these areas, few people could speak it and so they continued to communicate in their “local languages” instead. It can be said that Italy was inhabited by people who spoke a “continuum” of dialects whose features changed gradually from town to nearby town. It was nearly impossible to find a place, or a boundary, where a dialect ceased to be spoken and a different one was used in its place, with one dialect gradually fading into the other.
Traveling across Sicily, you could (and still can) listen to different “dialects” of Sicilian being spoken from one end to the other. Crossing the strait of Messina, you would hear Calabrese dialect being spoken. At first the Calabrese dialect would have several points in common with Sicilian, but as you moved North, it would become markedly different, without there being a precise place or boundary where it changed abruptly.
This also happens while moving across the peninsula, north from Calabria to Piedmont and east from Piedmont to Veneto.
Linguists find conventional “isoglosses” (a line on a dialect map marking the boundary between linguistic features) where some features change systematically, such as the pronunciation of certain sounds, or the use of certain words. But don’t expect to cross one of these lines and find that people speak completely differently: the languages spoken immediately to one side and to the other of the isogloss are virtually identical, only that on one side they have a certain feature, that linguists have recognized, that allows to fit them within a specific “linguistic family” while on the other this feature is missing.
All these languages spoken in Italy are called dialects, but they are not dialects
of standard Italian: they are rather the evolution of the dialects of “vulgar Latin,” a language spoken in ancient times which lived alongside the best known “classical Latin,” and which was itself divided in hundreds of dialects, not being codified nor standardized.
There has never been, until very recent times, a common language spoken by almost everyone in Italy, and what we
call “languages” such as “vulgar Latin” or “Tuscan” or “Sardinian” were groups of
dialects sharing many common features. The standardization of Latin, which gave rise to what we call “classical Latin” was limited to
a few accultured people who used it to write literature, to address the gods and to write laws and court rulings. For common matters, the dialects that are collectively known as “vulgar Latin” were used by everyone.
In addition to the dialects of modern-day Italy, there are also two groups of languages and dialects that have had an independent evolution from vulgar Latin and are therefore considered separate languages from the other languages of Italy: Ladin and Sardinian.
Ladin is a group of dialects spoken along the Central and Eastern Alps, of which the most widely spoken “dialect” is Friulan, spoken in the northeastern Italian region of Friuli Venezia Giulia. Sardinian is spoken on the island of Sardinia and is divided in two large groups of dialects: Logudorese, which is by far the most conservative Romance language of all, having a vocabulary and a pronunciation which is remarkably close
to the vulgar Latin spoken in the first and second centuries BC. Campidanese, which is also a very conservative language, has
a consistent influence from Catalan and Castilian Spanish during over 200 years of Iberian domination.
It can be said that Italy was inhabited by people who spoke a “continuum” of dialects whose features changed gradually from town to nearby town.
Finally, be aware that a distinction between “language” and “dialect” is always arbitrary and made less clear by its political value: As linguist Max Weinreich once said, “A language is a dialect with a navy and
an army.” IAH
ITALIAN-AMERICAN HERALD
JULY 2021 | ITALIANAMERICANHERALD.COM 5
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