spite the« family look », italian, french, spanish, portuguese arewell distinct nowaday – but if we look at galician, catalan,gascon, limousin, languedocien, auvergnat, provençal,franco-provençal (a pass to some Switzerland romance dialect),romanch, ladin, walloon, oil dialects, piemontese, lombardian... wesee NO steep frontier – the same with corsican, 3 sardiniandialects, sicilian and so on.
I would agree with all of that Moesan, and it's borne out in my own personal experience. I studied for a while in Barcelona. I was quite amazed to find that I could understand much of what was said to me in Catalan, more, it seemed, than my friends could, who, like me, were students of Spanish, but unlike me hadn't absorbed a Gallic-Italic "language" since childhood. (Although I don't speak any Italian "dialects" I do understand quite a bit of the Gallo-Italian dialects of my area.) That's probably also why I understand some Franco Provencal.
Even with "languages" certainly considered separate from Italian, I think there is quite a bit of inter-comprehension, so again, it's a continuum. I always understood a good amount of spoken Spanish even before I studied it. True, because of the pronunciation, I understood very little spoken French before studying it; however, I could quite easily read it. I had a rather similar experience with Romanian, based on its relationship to the central Italian languages and therefore standard Italian. I found that if I really concentrated I could pick up the general sense of the conversation. Of course, I have to admit that I have a good "ear" for languages, and an aptitude even for grammar, and this might not be true for everyone.
I just recently noticed that the same thing works with English and the Scandinavian languages. I've been watching quite a few Scandinavian language films and tv series recently, which provide English subtitles. I'm finding that I can pick up words which although not identical, obviously have the same source.
So, as I said, in a far less erudite fashion than you have done, I think it's a continuum, and other than for people with a political ax to grind, it's a matter of academic interest. Actual people just want to get on with their lives, and they adopt the speech patterns which will provide them with the most economic and social benefit.
so at first, with low numberedpopulations, sister/brother dialects separated, with easilyhomogenous and well resumed evolutions, and after two ways : aspopulations grow, contacts grow and it is a political-commercialpower that decides the more complicated evolution based uponinerminglings and choices, OR it is a completely foreign languagethat comes in the game, again with political-commercial interactions–
Very true, with the added gloss that in the case of Italy, Toscana was no longer the commercial or political power of Italy when the Tuscan
literary language was chosen as the Italian standard. (I think non-Italians lose sight of the fact that the common people of Tuscany did not speak the literary language watched over by the Accademia della Crusca, although their speech is very related to it. Also, this literary language, created in the 13th-14th centuries, had been added to by non-Tuscans like the Venetian Pietro Bembo, and was given a Milanese flavor by Alessandro Manzoni, a very influential writer from Milan. I'm not aware of any other situation where a language was deliberately created by poets and other writers, and then over the centuries was added to by other writers, to wind up being chosen to become the unifying national standard through the proselytyzing of writers, artists and musicians (most of them non-Tuscan, like Manzoni and Verdi). Of course, the Piemontese royal family then threw the might of the new state behind it, and it became sort of a religion under Mussolini, so your point stands. (The only
somewhat analagous situation might be that of Hebrew, and its adoption by the state of Israel. )
all the way, with time and more or lesscentralization, but economic exchanges, the « national »language imposes its lexicon word by word (the more common or theofficial forged one), even before unifying the pronounciation-
This is another very important point. It's a well documented phenomenom in Italy that the "dialects" have changed a great deal since the time of the Risorgimento, the institution of mandatory education, and the advent of television, and they continue to change. Partly, it's a question of a lot of truncation. At the same time, more and more standard Italian influence has appeared in them, with whole stretches of new vocabulary words. This is totally understandable, given that many, although not all of these dialects were agrarian languages that never had the vocabulary for commerce, or trade, or higher level abstract thinking.(The dialects of Genova and Venezia did have such a vocabulary, but not very far inland, they did not.) What has also happened is that even where dialect use has more of a presence, the smaller dialects, if one could call them that, the dialects of a city or even a province have disappeared altogether in favor of a more "regional" dialect.
Pronunciation is far more resistant, although with the rise of television, more and more people "sound" like, or
try to "sound" like the television presenters. It's the same in all industrialized, modern media countries, I think: as Aberdeen pointed out, if you want to climb the social ladder in England, it pays to sound like you work for the BBC. Even in America, I found out later that one reason I got a very competitive job was because my American speech "sounded like" the quasi Western New England/Middle Western speech of the tv newscasters, which my employers considered "classier". Part of it was serendipity; that's where my family ended up when we immigrated. Partly though, I had set out to sound like those people, and thanks to a good ear, some talent for mimicry, and a lot of determination and practice, I did.
The influence has also gone the other way, with "dialectical" forms of words or pronunciations of words creeping into standard Italian. Of course, that's all quite unacceptable to "purists", but a language that doesn't change as society changes dies in my opinion.
