After some time absent, it's time for me to recall this fascinating blog, and I couldn't avoid dedicating one post to one of the favourite languages, Italian.
One of the things that has drawn my attention the most is that this language has a huge variety of regional dialects. Martin Maiden and Mair Perry stated in their book "The Dialects of Italy" (1997), the following: "Italy holds special treasures for linguists. There is probably no other area of Europe in which such a profusion of variation, at all levels of linguistic structure, is concentrated into so small a geographical area". Therefore I decided to do some research and find out more about this peculiarity.
Let's focus on some of these. They are all depicted in the map above.
Source: it.wikipedia.org
The germ of the Italian languages is the tuscan dialect, located in the stunning homonymous region Tuscany. The reason for the 12th-century written language in the cited region to become the standard in Italy is the great works by Dante Alighieri ("Divine Comedy"), Francesco Petrarca or Giovanni Boccaccio, among others. The unification of Italy in 1861 led to the introduction of Italian as the official language, despite only 4% of the people being able to speak it. The language was then spreaded by the army moves, intern migrations, the cinema and television. The tuscan dialect is widely understood by Italians, which is not case when it comes to other dialects such as these:
Franco-Provençal (FP in the map below) is located in the Italian territory in the region Valle D'Aosta, due to its proximity to the French-speaking Switzerland (western) and France. It's considered to be some mixture between French and Occitan, which is spoken in the yellowish region.
In the alpine area close to Austria, the German dialects are extended (Trentino-Alto Adige-Südtirol) to the extent that German is also an official language and some cities have denominations in both Italian and German, such as Bolzano/Bozen or Merano/Meran.
Veneziano is mostly spoken in Veneto, one of the richest regions in Italy. I had the chance to visit Venice last month and I couldn't help but notice the streets ("via") were named "calle", which shocked me since this is the Spanish denomination for street. I first thought that the Spaniards had possibly occupied this region in the ancient times, but not really. It's simply a narrow alley typical from the region.
Neapolitano is the dialect spoken in the Naples area. The occupancy of the Spaniards and Catalan in the Middle Ages (XVI century) definitely made a strong influence in this dialect, as we can see in this table below:
Moving on to the occidental island of Sardegna, the dialect spoken in Alghero is a variant of Catalan. The Catalans occupied the city in the XIV century and left their linguistic legacy in the town.
Finally, I'd like to point out some other external influences such as Slavic languages in the closest area to Slovenia, Albanian in southern Italy or even Greek (Puglia).
Even though Italian is the widespread language throughout the Italian territory, a bunch of dialects and other languages also make such a strong influence that make this area linguistically speaking absolutely rich.
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