language and dialect question.

wonton

I'm studying some Italian history in college at the moment and read that something like before unification only about 2.5 % of the area now called Italy spoke Italian, and the rest spoke other related dialects.

Something similar was also on the show QI before about how very little of current day france spoke french before the revolution.


Am I wong is saying that the differences wouldn't have actually been that great and you would probably find bigger differences between regional variations of say english in different counties, and if so, why do they point out only 2.5% spoke Italian? I would guess what it means really is that only 2.5% spoke what *would* become standardised Italian.


seems like they are trying to make something surprising and interesting out of kind of nothing really

Zio

I live in Italy and I can tell you even now there is a big difference between dialects and standard Italian. Standard Italian is infact a Tuscany dialect that was adopted by the when Italy was united (maybe the influence of big banking clans like the Medici for example). Every region has there own dialect which is just like a another language Napolitano is very hard for other Italians to understand same goes for Calabrese,Sicliano and Sardinian (Probably the most distinct) Italians I know from other regions couldent understand them at all infact. Regional even cross continental differences in English are nothing compared to the differences between Italian and the dialects. Theres a saying 'A dialect is a language without an army and navy'. So if its so diverse now imagine how different it was back when Italy was united!

Enkidu

wonton wrote: »

seems like they are trying to make something surprising and interesting out of kind of nothing really

No, what they're saying is correct. 80% of France at the time could not understand what we call French at all. The differences were much larger than those between different types of English.

There were several other Romance languages spoken, as well as two Celtic languages and some Germanic ones.

franc 91

Yes I agree - when you think that many French soldiers who fought and died in the 1914-18 War spoke mainly in what was disparagingly called at that time patois, though that doesn't mean that they didn't understand standard French - they'd had that forced on them at school. I've heard that in Italy one of the factors that made people 'tune' into standard Italian (Tuscan) was watching the television. Similarly I've heard that in Algeria, to give you another example, on the television they had soaps made in Egypt in a form of Arabic that was quite different from their own, but eventually they got used to hearing it and managed to understand it.

population

I live in Naples and the dialect here really is completely different to Italian. I can speak a few phrases in dialect and in fact have on occasion said something to an Italian from another region when I am home in Dublin, only to discover that I used a word in dialect. To give you an example of the differences 'boy' in Italian is ragazzo, and in Napolitano it is 'Yaio' which I am sure I have spelt incorrectly but it is pronounced like that. As a poster pointed out above TV really helped the spread of standard Italian to take hold.

franc 91

We have a friend who came to work in a research lab here, she comes from a village near Rome and at one time she managed to get a job in a laboratory in Naples. As she wasn't local, she soon realised that she wasn't exactly welcome - all the time she was there, they spoke in Napolitano between themselves, which she couldn't understand. As the crow flies, Rome isn't that far away but the people are very different. She ended up by going back to Rome.

population

franc 91 wrote: »

We have a friend who came to work in a research lab here, she comes from a village near Rome and at one time she managed to get a job in a laboratory in Naples. As she wasn't local, she soon realised that she wasn't exactly welcome - all the time she was there, they spoke in Napolitano between themselves, which she couldn't understand. As the crow flies, Rome isn't that far away but the people are very different. She ended up by going back to Rome.

Really? Terrible if true. In what way are the people very different? I know people who work in research labs here and usually the first language is English, then Italian and speaking Napolitano in a setting such as this would be frowned upon. In general though a Roman who speaks Roman dialect can get a handle on the Naples dialect if they had to. There is also an issue that within the city itself the dialect can change quite dramatically. The centro storico dialect is different from Pozzoulian, so to put that in context, in Gardner Street they would speak a completely different language to someone living in DunLaoighre, therefore the default is usually Italian.

franc 91

Well all I know is that she very definitely felt excluded and she also very definitely said that she couldn't understand what they were saying.
By the way I have a wonderful book and CD of lullabies in Italian and of course they come from all over Italy, so they have to say where they originate from. Some are quite difficult to understand and I have had to ask for help on an Italian website about it. Even there people didn't find it easy to answer my queries. I also picked up a very interesing children's magazine in Rome when I was there, about reading and literacy - and again the children who contributed to it were very proud to provide proverbs and sayings in their own dialect, but had to explain what they meant.

tac foley

Try living in the so-called Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. There, quite literally, people of different religions in different parishes have difficulty understanding exactly what is said elsewhere.

tac