My Italian language teacher always stood firm on this issue but now I want to hear what people on this forum think: Do the people of Italy speak different dialects or languages? When I visit Italy I ask this question and it's always a quick answer; dialect not language. It becomes an argument until it unravels itself at the heart of Italian politics, ancient regional divides and even the risorgimento. I'm not including German, Catalan, French Provence, Croatian, Albanian and Greek that have firm roots in Italy but what is thought of as an Italian language/dialect. In places like Macedonia and Bulgaria they speak separate languages but really they understand each other more or less, Norwegians have a similar vocabulary to Danes but pronunciation is more like Swedes whose words have different meaning. I've met a Roman who said he can't understand people from Calabria, Apulia, Basilicata and especially Sicily. Is the issue political? I'd like to know what everybody's view is on this.
You would think that linguists should be able to tell us precisely, but I think that if you were to ask three linguists you might get three different answers. They can't even agree where to put the precise geographic/linguistic divide between the Gallo-Italic "languages" and the rest of them.(Ed. Is it at La Spezia, or further south near Massa?) I know that mutual intelligibility is one criterion. It's always seemed to me, however, that it depends what you "mean" by intelligibility. How intelligible do they have to be for classification as "dialects" and not "languages"?
I think it's basically a continuum, and the dividing lines can be pretty arbitrary. I, like many Italians, was grateful that the film Gomorrah was released with "Italian" subtitles. That doesn't mean I wasn't able to follow a lot of it. It's just that it takes too much concentration when people speak in "dialects" with which I'm not that familiar. I also always miss a certain portion of the "sense" of the conversation because of the pronunciation or the fact that certain words are different. Ed. I guess my point is that it's not like listening to Russian for me, for example. It's also more intelligible than Spanish, although I could get the general sense of conversations in Spanish even before I studied it in school. Spoken French was less intelligible, although written French was very comprehensible. So, are all these "languages" really just corrupted dialects of Latin because there is some intelligibility between them? I don't know. As I said, where do you draw the line?
Then, as you say, there is the question of politics. People in Italy who want more political autonomy for their regions will call their regional speech a "language" rather than a dialect because it bolsters their political claims. People who are dedicated to the idea of an Italian nation state will call them all dialects. I don't see that it much matters what you call them.
The history of the development of the "standard" Italian language is pretty clear. All this talk about the fact that Italian didn't exist before the Risorgimento is just incorrect in my opinion, and a re-writing of history. What was to become the "Italian" language taught in all Italian schools was first codified by Dante in the early 14th century when he wrote the Commedia in his native Florentine. It was read throughout Italy, and became the "canonical standard" among all educated Italians, in use for correspondence, business, and literature. Later, Manzoni would place a gloss on it with his Milanese, although he would say that he had gone to Firenze to "purify" his language by bathing it in the waters of the Arno. Now, had the high culture of Sicily continued to develop, "Sicilian" might have become the 'standard'. However, history didn't turn out that way.
The operative word here is education, because at the same time it's true that the majority of the population of the peninsula and islands which make up the Italian nation state didn't speak standard Italian until very late because they were illiterate or at least poorly educated, and many, especially in the south, didn't speak it until after the advent of television. So, there are whole diaspora populations who don't really speak "Italian" at all, because the emigrants didn't speak it, and, in fact, were illiterate even in their "dialects".
Class is another factor. In most of Italy, "dialects" were the language of the lower, uneducated classes. For much of Italian history speaking only them relegated you to a lower class, as did having too strong a "regional" accent. I think England may have been much the same.
Regardless, in many parts of Italy it's becoming rather academic what you call them, because they are spoken much less frequently, and when spoken at all, only in "home" situations, never at work or in more "formal" milieus. You can't conduct business in them, or have academic conversations in them because, for one thing, the vocabulary just doesn't exist. This is true even in areas like Sicily, or the Veneto, where it has political connotations. I hear frequently from older Sicilian or Neapolitan Americans that when they go back to search for their "roots", they find that the young speak only a very truncated version of the old dialects, and even then only in informal situations. You just need to look at the Unesco study of the Italian "languages": Lombard, Ligurian, Emilian, Piemontese, Friulan, Sardinian, among others, are "endangered"; Sicilian, Campanian, and Venetian are "vulnerable".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy
