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Regional Italian (, ) is any regional"Regional" in the broad sense of the word; not to be confused with the Italian endonym , for Italy's administrative units. variety of the Italian language.
Such vernacular varieties and standard Italian exist along a sociolect continuum, and are not to be confused with the local non-immigrant languages of ItalyNotwithstanding their linguistic status, most of the actual languages of Italy (with particular reference to the non-recognised ones) are called "dialects" () by the general population. that predate the national tongue or any regional variety thereof. Among these languages, the various Tuscan dialect, Corsican and some Central Italian lects are, to some extent, the closest ones to standard Italian in terms of linguistic features, since the latter is based on a somewhat polished form of Florentine.
The various forms of Regional Italian have phonological, morphological, Syntax, prosodic and lexical features which originate from the underlying substrate of the original language of the locale.
Even though the Sicilian School, using the Sicilian language, had been prominent earlier, by the 14th century the Tuscan dialect of Florence had gained prestige once Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio all wrote major works in it: the Divine Comedy, the Il Canzoniere]] and the The Decameron. Italian, defined as such, began to spread and be used as a literary and prestigious means of expression across the whole peninsula, Sicily and Corsica in the late Middle Ages;Marazzini, Breve storia della lingua italiana, 2004, cit., p. 54. on the other hand, it would be introduced to Sardinia by a specific order only in the second half of the 18th century (1760), when the island's ownership passed over to the House of Savoy. It was up to Pietro Bembo, a Venetian, to identify Florentine as the language for the peninsula in the Prose nelle quali si ragiona della volgar lingua (1525), in which he set up Petrarch as the perfect model. Italian, however, was a literary language and so was a written rather than spoken language, except in Tuscany and Corsica.
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. Having lived in Paris for many years, Manzoni had noticed that French language (defined as the capital's dialect) was a very lively language, spoken by ordinary people in the city's streets. 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.
The Italian history of fragmentation and colonization by foreign powers (especially France, Spain and the Austrian Empire) between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and its unification in 1861 played a considerable role in further jeopardizing the linguistic situation. When the unification process took place, the newly founded country used Italian mainly as a literary language. Many Romance and non-Romance regional languages were spoken throughout the Italian Peninsula and the islands, each with their own local dialects.
Italian as a spoken language was born in two "linguistic labs"Tullio De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell'Italia unita, Bari, Laterza, 1963. 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. The regional varieties of Italian, as a product of standard Italian mixing with the regional languages, were also born.
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.
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. 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.
Based on borders like La Spezia-Rimini, here are the most well-identified groups of regional Italian.
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 in Northern Italy while the standard pronunciation is , 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 () consonant in intervocalic position, whereas in the south it is always voiceless: vs. . 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 consonants (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 in contrast with the standard pronunciation .
The consonants /ʃ, tʃ, dʒ/ are labialized in standard Italian (ʃʷ,), but in northern varieties they're not.
Final N's (even though they're not usually found in words with an Italian origin) are usually pronounced as velars in northern varieties, so the typical Venetian surname "Martin" is pronounced as in Northern Italy but in Central and Southern Italy.
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 time is phonetically realized as
Widespread use of 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, as it is used with a semantic sense in contrast to that of standard Italian.
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.
In continental Southern Italy there is a different distribution of closed and open vowels (The pronunciation "giòrno" with an open o is very widespread in Campania for example), while in Calabria, Salento and Sicily closed vowels are completely missing and speakers just pronounce open vowels (), while in the other regions the discrepancies with the pronunciation Standards are minor (albeit relevant) and non-homogeneous; on the Adriatic side is more evident, as in certain areas of central-east Abruzzo (Chieti-Sulmona), largely in central-northern Apulia (Foggia-Bari-Taranto), and in eastern Basilicata (Matera) where it is present The so-called "syllabic isocronism": free syllable vowels are all pronounced closed and those in close syllables all open (see the well-known example un póco di pòllo instead of un pòco di póllo "a bit of chicken"); Even in the Teramo area (northern Abruzzo), and up to Pescara, the vowels are pronounced with a single open sound (for example dove volete andare stasera? , Thus showing an inexplicable coincidence with the phonetic outcomes of Sicily and Calabria, although there is no direct link with them. As already mentioned here, the intervocalic s is always voiceless, and the use of the Preterite Tense is also frequent instead of the use of the present perfect. In continental southern Italy, from Rome down to Calabria, possessive pronouns often are placed after the noun: for example il libro mio instead of il mio libro ("my book").
Another characteristic of regional Italian varieties in central and southern Italy is deaffrication of /tʃ/ between vowels, both word-internally and across word boundaries. In almost all peninsular Italy from Tuscany to Sicily luce is pronounced rather than , la cena is pronounced instead of as it is pronounced in northern Italy and in standard Italian.
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 subject-verb-object structure. The (often auxiliary) verb usually ends up at the end of the sentence, especially in exclamatory and interrogative sentences (e.g. Uscendo stai?, literally "Going out are you?", from the Sardinian Essinde ses?, instead of Stai uscendo?; Studiando stavo! "Been studying have I!", from Istudiende fia!, instead of Stavo studiando!; Legna vi serve? "In need of some wood are you?" from Linna bos serbit?, instead of Avete bisogno di un po' di legna?). It is also common for interrogative sentences to use a pleonastic tutto "all", from the Sardinian totu, as in Cosa tutto hai visto? "What all have you seen?" from Ite totu as bidu? compared with the standard Italian Cosa hai visto?. The present continuous makes use of the verb essere "to be" as in English rather than stare (e.g. Sempre andando e venendo è! "Always walking up and down she/he is!" from Semper/Sempri andande e beninde est! compared with the standard Italian Sta sempre andando e venendo!): that is because the present continuous built with verb stare does not, in such regional variety, express the idea of an action ongoing at a certain point, but rather something that will take place in the very near future, almost on the point of happening (e.g. Sto andando a scuola with the meaning of "I'm about to go to school" rather than "Right now as we speak, I'm going to school"). It is also common to use Antiphrasis formulas which are alien to Italian, Retorica e italiano regionale: il caso dell'antifrasi nell'italiano regionale sardo, Cristina Lavinio, in Cortelazzo & Mioni 1990 by means of the particle già (Sard. jai / giai) which is similar to the German language use of ja... schon especially for ironic purposes, in order to convey sardonic remarks (e.g. Già sei tutto studiato, tu! "You're so well educated!" from Jai ses totu istudiatu, tue! which roughly stands for "You are so ignorant and full of yourself!", or Già è poco bello! "He/It is not so beautiful!" from Jai est pacu bellu! meaning actually "He/It is so beautiful!"). One also needs to take into consideration the presence of a number of other Sardinian-specific idiomatic phrases being literally translated into Italian (like Cosa sembra? "What does it look like?" from Ite paret? meaning "How do you do?" compared to the standard Italian Come stai?, Mi dice sempre cosa! "She/He's always scolding me!" from the Sardinian Semper cosa mi narat! compared to the standard Italian Mi rimprovera sempre!, or again Non fa! "No chance!" from Non fachet! / Non fait! compared to standard Italian Non si può!), that would make little sense to an Italian speaker from another region.
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, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, UTET, Torino, V. III, p.654Antonietta 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. 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 seada s", "un tenore s", 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 () 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 voicing is the same as in Northern Italy, that is .
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