I was born and lived in Napoli, but learned only Standard Italian. I didn't learn how to speak proper Neapolitan until I was in my early teens. I then moved to the USA when I was in 8th grade, not knowing any English, but which I mastered quite rapidly. One time I was asked by my 9th grade teacher to translate for another newly arrived Italian kid, who didn't know any English and was having a rough time. I tried to speak to him, but all I got was that his name was Giovanni and that he was from Bari. The kid spoke strictly in dialect and I only spoke Italian so I guess he understood me, but I sure couldn't understand him. My teacher was puzzled as to how two Italians couldn't understand one another. I was a bit puzzled myself, because I recall telling her, "Miss, I don't know what he's saying, but he's not speaking Italian." She looked at me as if I were crazy! 😅😊
The real mystery is how Apulia dialects proper are considered, linguistically, local dialects of Neapolitan, when only the northern one are really similar to Neapolitan and from Cerignola down south they're utterly incomprehensible to Neapolitans. I'd say they evolved from a quite different form of speech than that which ended up as Neapolitan and similar dialects, which are heirs to Oscan forms of Latin. Apulia hosted non-Italic populations (branches of Illyrians) originally.
Maybe this could be useful for you to know. It's called Neapolitan not in relation to the city of Naples but in relation to the Kingdom of Naples, which of course included the Puglia region
This reminds me when I was in the 5th grade. We got a kid from Portugal, and he didn't speak English at all so they had a girl who could speak Spanish to translate for him.
I am fluent in English, Italian Spanish and a dialect of calabria. There is a dialect of calabria that is an old griko that dates back to the magna grecia. It has since become extinct even in Greece and isn't spoken much by youth from what I understand so once the elderly speakers pass on it will be a defunct language. I believe archeologists/historians used the dialect to decipher old texts from the magna grecia. I wish I had the opportunity and time to learn this language/dialect and hear it spoken amongst the elders. Cheers
I had the good fortune of being immersed in Italian when visiting with a friend and her family in the North of Italy. Speaking conversational Spanish and a bit of French, I find it a bit easy to understand standard Italian and so was enjoying trying to converse as I listened and learned from my hosts. One day I was introduced to an aunt I had not met yet and in exchange for my greeting she said something I could not understand at all and the. Asked a question I could not understand with exception of the word “dialetto”. I was shock that the “dialect” there was so incomprehensible to me and have been fascinated with “dialetti” since! Absolutely amazing how diverse Italy is linguistically.
As another Spanish speaker Italian is surprisingly inteligible with our native tongue. Not as close as Portuguese of course but very close still. I'm definitely interested more with Italian "dialects" for sure.
¿Te estaban hablando en lombardo o laghèe?, porque en mi familia es igual, un tío tenía que literalmente traducir absolutamente todo porque lo único que hablaba era dialecto.
British guy that lives in Taranto here. It’s exactly how he says. Generally I started out learning Italian, then my colleagues inserted the odd few words into conversation so I picked those up, and then they start to speak more in Tarantino. A couple of little phrases I learned are like this: Fa caldo: f sc’ cavd Fa freddo: f sc’ frid Ora andiamo a magiare: mo ama sce mangia Che cazzo vuoi: c’è ue 🤌🏼 Andiamo: schiamn
Please do the deep dive on the differences between dialects and languages, that sounds extremely interesting. I'm very much enjoying this channel Metatron.
Oh that's a pretty easy question I know the answer of. Answer: There's none. It's a political distinction. The word language carries prestige and dialect doesn't. There's more to talk about like some examples of dialects which are utterly incomprehensible to each other and as far apart as German and English are, and languages that are considered separate but are in reality closer than New York English is to Boston English.
Let me answer with a historical parallel: when Yugoslavia was a single country, all the variants of Serbo-Croatian language were not called languages. Today, each of the independent countries claims its variant as a language: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin. Now think that Italian local languages are MUCH more different from one another than those variants of Serbo-Croatian. What do they lack to be considered languages? Recognition and status from being an official language of a country. Some exceptions are Sardinian, Ladin and Friulian that are indeed officially recognized, because they are so different from standard Italian.
I learned standard Italian and lived in both Sardinia and Sicily. I found that most local Italian speakers will sprinkle local words into their speech so I would pick up words that way and I would occasionally use those words. Words like the local version of andiamo or figlia or flglio. For a period of time, I had an email address where my email name was my name, but with the Sardinian modifier "eddu" at the end for 'little".
I was quite surrounded by different Italian accents when growing up: my grandpa was born in Sicily, my grandma was born in Marche, in the 1950s they moved to Sardegna, where my father and his siblings were born, and then the whole family moved to Milan and later, one of my uncles moved to Rome. My grandma used to tell me how Rai, along with school programs, played a rather big role in spreading Italian through the peninsula after WW2, an Italian which, despite coming from Florence, had some influences from Milan and Rome as well.
RAI played a great role indeed. Standard Italian derives from hundreds of years of a so called "pulitura della lingua", a cleaning of various aspects dated back from Dante to Alessandro Manzoni, to name the most important writers in this subject. In the '50 RAI TV, the national public broadcaster, aired the program "Non è mai troppo tardi" (It is never too late) which purpose was to teach middle aged men and women, who only spoke their dialects, the Standard. It was so well done that Professor Manzi is missed also nowadays. Oh, and at the end of this video, I'd love to see Metatron collab with XiaomaNYC ❤. Also it would be awesome if Raffaello will have a video about the "sciacquare i panni in Arno". I am sure he knows quite a few about that!
The sad thing is, the so called dialects became unacceptable in many regions before, during and post ww2. I'm Sardinian and my granma from the maternal side never wanted her daughters to speak Sardinian even at home (my mom and aunts grew up in Switzerland until pre-teen then the family moved back to Sardinia in the 70's), even if granny was not well spoken in italian (she only went to school until third grade. then ww2 broke). My paternal side of the family on the other hand speaks very good Sardinian and Italian, so I grew up with my dad almost never using Sardinian because of my mother, and I'm the only one of three kids that speaks Sardinian, because by the time my siblings were born my grans had died or had severe impairments. I ended up acing french and english classes in middle school, studying ancient greek and latin in highscool, Mandarin at Uni and having a huge interest in languages, while my siblings never had what I think is the huge advantage of growing up multilingual: elasticity. Let aside the fact that culture is passed on by language and we should cherish all diversity.
Learned Italian at school, teacher was from Sardinian, but we learned neutral Italian. Fast forward many years, my kids traveled to Bergamo in the north, their Italian from school (same school) got them through.😊
I'm studying Standard Italian but have a fascination for Piemontese, partly due to my interest in traditional music - there are a few resources that I've found, including Italian-Piemontese dictionaries.
Greetings! I'm an American of Italian ancestry: Sicilian, Neapolitan, and Barese. The first time I traveled in Italy, I had learned Standard Italian. While in Italy I easily picked up Neapolitan after constantly hearing it in Caserta. When I was in Bari, my relatives would sometimes speak in Barese: I was astonished by the pronunciation which reminded me very much of English Cockney. I didn't understand what was said, but I felt as if I were in some part of England. I wonder if this is due to the Norman conquest. Did the Normans bring the same sounds to Southern Italy as they did to England???
Can you give a more in-depth explication of the differences in grammar and pronunciation between Italian, Siciliaan and Friulian and give us some sample sentences?
Which is meaningless, and even contradictory if you consider how a language is a group of linguistic systems (aka dialects) with shared morphology, syntaxis and mutual intellegibillity. Tuscan is a language encompassing Florentine, Senese and Livornese (and by heavens DO NOT try to put these people in the ssme room, at least without a comfy seat with popcorn). Italian itself has its own proper dialect (just ask around what was the fuss with #escile)
@@FlagAnthem The distinction itself is meaningless. Talking about languages and dialects is a political move. I've seen more difference within Arabic and within Norwegian than I've seen between Swedish & Danish. Or Serbian and Croatian. Some Chinese dialects are as far apart as Russian is to English yet they often consider them dialects of Chinese. It's all nonsense, even the etymology suggests the same roots meaning "way of speaking" If it was up to ME, I'd call each dialect a language and be done with it. Yeah there are tens of thousands of languages around the world, fine by me, but there are millions of towns and cities, it's expected.
@@crusaderACRo it isn't. Dialect is to language what a shade is to colours. Status itself is nonsense You wouldn't call Latin or Irish dialects And you wouldn't argue americans canadians and australians speaking other languages rather than variants of English (unless you want to get political, so...)
@@FlagAnthem Shades and colors are just as made up by consensus, except more. If you ask an Italian what color is the shirt of their soccer team, they'll refuse to call it blue. It's light blue. Light blue is a shade in English but in Italian it's a different word and a different color altogether. In English, orange was a shade of brown (or red) until a few centuries ago. Remnants of this are seen in the name of the red fox, that fox is clearly orange isn't it? Also Latin was certainly considered a dialect. I'm Hispanic, and guess how Spanish speakers called Latin class in the 10th century, when it was much closer to Caesar's Latin? Grammar class. Because you studied the "old" grammar, the language was the same. In fact, we called it grammar class until the 20th century, funnily enough. The first bible in "Spanish" was in the early renaissance and called "Biblia romanceada". Not Spanish. Edit: Romanceado means like, "roman'd" or "made into a more roman style" because it was a "translation" from the 5th century Latin Vulgate into how modern "romans" actually spoke.
@@crusaderACR exactly italian it was imposed over other regional lenguage sometime older than (florentian of 1300 or italiano standard ) friulano kowm like minoritarian lenguage is born arround 1000 A.C. Ventian lenguage was used like english now in all mediterranen lands for a busines arts commerce etc.
My parents are from Abruzzo. That was the only Italian I was exposed to. When I was finally united with my relatives in Italy, I thanked them for hosting my new husband and I. A distant second aunt, clapped her hands and called out, she even thanked us in Lancianese ( local dialect) . It was all I knew. A year later I was Rome and thought wow, my Italian is very bad. I keep getting confused looks when I speak. That was when I found out, I could speak and understand Lancianese and that it really was different than standard Italian. I explained it to my son that trying to understand and speak standard Italian was like doing so through lots of static. But understanding my family’s dialect was a crystal clear signal. 😂
My grandparents were and mom is Sicilian, and im still studying both italian and sicilian (from catania more specifically Randazzo) because i always refused to learn when i was a kid. I’m only around high a2 or low b1 level in italian. I chose to learn japanese for 6 years instead and got JLPT N1 and some other certificates. It feels weird that im able to speak way better in japanese than italian, since all of my family is italian. I feel like a shame to my family so I’m making sure I don’t give up
I advise you to watch some all time movie greats in Italian dub, as the Italian dub is one of the greatest you'll ever hear. (The godfather is perfect) good luck with your learning! :)
For someone who speak well 4 latin origin languages (native french, fluent spanish portuguese italian) The nothern dialects to me really look like a evil french dude tried to frenchified italian 😂 And southern dialects its like a crazy dude stoled random spanish portuguese french words. And italianized it 😂
My father was from Pinerolo, and he spoke Italian and Piedmontese. For many years I thought it was just an accent/dialect of italian as most dialects is a variation of the same language. And everybody refered to it as a "dialect" wich to me does not mean another language. All dialects (labeled dialects) save for one (Älvdalska), here in Sweden is actual standard Swedish with some regional words and pronounciation/sound differences. And Älvdalska at least in part is clearly related to Swedish even though it is so different. I don't speak Italian myself but knowing portuguese and also being around italian a bit more I understand 50-60% of it. I was in my teens before I realised when he spoke on the phone with my aunt one day that it's not even close. Norwegian is closer to Swedish than Piedmontese is to Italian imo. Piedmontese looks to me to be like a mismash of latin, french, german and some slavic language spoken with italian and basque sounds. 😅
from a Triestino, I have to give credit to this Furlan guy. This is one of the best explanation you will find of Italians dialects. Great video, mulon!
The same with English. When I sprinkle my British RP with some Geordie when in Newcastle, Yorkshire when in Sheffield, Scouse when in Liverpool, Scots when in Edinburgh, people seem to love it.
Sono Italo Brasilliano (origine emiliana) e ho vissuto in Italia per quasi 8 anni. Vivevo tra Vicenza e Padova e sono riuscito ad imparare un pò del dialetto Veneto. Non ho avuto tanta difficulta, poi il loro dialetto se assomiglia tantissimo al'italiano, al portoghese e allo spagnolo. Per me è stato una bella esperienza imparare la lingua locale.
@@orfeoassiti6669 , nel mio caso, è perche sono andato a studiare archeologia all'Università di Padova. Gli altri creo che sia per l'origine, pois tanti veneti emigrarono in Brasile.
your story about the japanese plumber reminds me of the time i met an african man in bavaria, who spoke full on bavarian so much that he couldn't understand high german it was a surreal experience at the time.
Friendly remind that Emilian and Romagnol are NOT the same language (yes wikipedia, I'm looking at you) If you are interested in Regional Languages, be careful about what you get offered. True story: got one in chat claiming to speak my "native" regional language (SM Romagnol) when in the end he was tipping in Modenese (a dialect of Emilian). I won't say he wasted his time (chapeau for learning a local language), only it wasn't what he was thinking he was investing his efforts. It's sh*t like this making even more a nightmare trying to preserve our heritage.
I'm living in Sicilia and desperately trying to learn `Italian` but i live in a small village and 90% of them speak Siciliano. So i struggle to listen. They will speak standard Italian to me, but when they chat to each other they revert back. Eventually after i learn Italian, i want to learn the sicilian from my area.
A really interesting, informative and off-beat video on learning Italian. Learning that the dialects were full blown languages was something I didn't know.
This is the same with Arabic, we have to rely on Standard Arabic to communicate bc not only is the regional Arabic different, but often even our local neighboring countries that lie within our own regions differ in understanding. For example, the countries who speak Levantian Arabic (Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan) can sometimes slightly differ amongst themselves, but also greatly differ from the region of North African Arabic (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, West Sahara, Mauritania), the region of Gulf Arabic (Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi, UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen) and the region of African Arabic (Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Chad, Comoros and some parts of other bordering countries). And since Standard Arabic is this sort of ancient language preserved from the 7th century CE, then what it would sound like is if 2 people who speak English were attempting to communicate to each other in a Shakespearean dialect 😂
My grandparents came from Sicily. Oddly my dad learned Italian in America. My mom could not understand my dad when he spoke Italian. When speaking with my mom, he had to speak the Palermo dialect of Sicily.
Agree there. I once worked together with two guys from Sicily and when they talked amongst each other it was kind of a shock to realise how I didn't understand anything. I'm not fluent when speaking (Standard) Italian but can usually understand 99% Oh and I'd say this is true for most languages. If there is a "standardized" version, learn that first and pick up a/the regional dialect along the way
Excellent video! It brought back memories of stories my father told me about his upbringing. My grandfather came from the town of Cesena, in Romagna where everybody spoke Romagnol (or Romagnolo as you guys insist on calling it). He met my grandmother here in the U.S. but she came from a tiny village in the Aosta valley and spoke a French provencal language, probably vallentain or arbitan. Fortunately my grandfather went to the university in Bologna and was able to speak standard Italian. She also spoke Italian. When my father was growing up, they all spoke standard Italian only when the three of them were together. When it was just my grandfather and my father, they spoke Romagnol, when he was with his mother, they would speak the French provencal language, later my father and grandmother spoke English together. Nonno didn't begin to learn English until late in life. When my father was about 7 years old the family moved back to Cesena for 3 years, around 1923. At that time nobody in Cesena spoke standard Italian. Nonna (we called her, Nonnie) was very lonely in Cesena. She could not communicate at all with her inlaws. She was much happier after they returned to New York. I remember my father telling me that when Nonno first came to New York in 1903, he was very disappointed that most of the Italains living here spoke Sicilian or various Neopolitan languages. He was told that most northern Italians could be found in the Boston area, which is where he met my grandmother.
Great video. In my town there’s a restaurant owned by a guy from Verona so I learned some Venetian phrases and sprung it on him, he laughed really hard and thought it was great. My impression is that you should learn standard Italian, but at some point you should learn a little dialect to feel really Italian.
It's pretty similar to linguistic situation in China. After studying Mandarin for a while, I also studied a little bit of Shanghainese. It's fun enough to learn for it's own sake but its real world usage is quite limited. Native Shanghainese might think it's cute or funny but they will still prefer speaking Mandarin to you most of the time. I get the sense that precisely because regional languages are intimate to people, it feels strange to actually talk to some outsider in what's supposed to be the "home language".
Would absolutely LOVE a mini-course or lecture on Sicilian linguistics/ phonology (& the differences between the Palermo dialect vs Syracuse & all the rest) AND one on Neapolitan. Spent 2 weeks along the Amalfi Coast last year, & Sicily 4-5 years ago. Am fascinated by the local language & culture (& they're clearly very ancient cultures & societies, I mean, Naples is 1000 years older than Rome itself), but obviously, not a lot of information in English about it. Molte grazie.
Look for the work of Giuseppe Pitrè. Specifically Fiabe, Novelle E Racconti Popolari Siciliani. Pitrè was a folklorist who collected different folk tales from across Sicily and wrote a summary of the grammar based on the most common features.
A subtle point not mentioned in this video. If one learns “Italian” in a specific region-the person learning the language DOES NOT necessarily know s/he is picking up a regional dialect/language. I realized this later in my life that I was using words from the dialect used in Lucca because my mother was speaking to me that way. It was only when I went to school in Pisa (a mere 20km away) that I was using words in “Lucchese.” Great video and work. Bravissimo. 👏🏻
We Raffa, saluti da un friulano! L'idea di fare un deep dive nei dialetti mi piace un sacco. Dopo che ti ho sentito descrivere l'incomprensione tra il tuo siciliano e il friulano, ti consigio vivamente di guardarti "felici ma furlans" (ha i sottotitoli) e "tacons: perle di friulano" per capire un po' come funziona la lingua della terra dell'alcolismo. Per il resto buona fortuna con il canale, ti ho scoperto di recente ed è subito un subscribe meritato ;)
Attention : Sardinian is not derivative of the Italian Standard language. It's a specific language. The Northern Sardo Corsican dialects (almost 10% of the whole population of Sardinia) are the only languages that can be considered as derivative of Italian...
Dunno. I still think we lot should just stop calling them “dialects”, since they literally aren't dialects and this has also damaged their native speakers
Some are so decentralized that are more dialectal systems, this in central Italy is quite strong Also "dialect" is not a bad word, don't let the glottophobes take away all the fun
@@FlagAnthem Not sure what you mean with decentralised, but yeah I know that in the centre of Italy there mostly are dialects derived from Tuscan. The word dialect wouldn't be a bad word, if Italians didn't perceive all the regional languages as broken Italian because of it. Most regional languages aren't granted official recognition and natives are damaged by these circumstances, nevertheless we just keep using the word dialect, even when we know it's factually incorrect
@@hashcosmos2181 "decentralized" means that each dialect is quite distant to the point that is difficult to see theklm as variants of one language. An Emilian speaker from Piacenza and one from Modena may have some difficult to understand one from Bologna or Ferrara
One more story: as a child, growing up in the 1960s, my father who was fluent in Romagnol, standard italian, french and arbitan, was always careful never to speak any foreign language in public. He was always silent when we were together walking around New York. Many years later I found out that the F.B.I. picked him up for investigation at the beginning of W.W.2. He later served in the U.S. Army. One day we went to the airport to pick up his cousin Vilma and her husband. They had just arrived from Cesena, Italy in Romagna. As we were waiting, there was a woman sitting a few feet away who was very distraught and upset. She had just come from Italy apparently and didn't speak English. The airline got an Italian translator, but when she spoke to the woman, they could not understand each other. I was very confused (I was only 10 years old) I couldn't understand why 2 Italians couldn't communicate with each other. I looked over to my father. He looked upset, as though he was struggling with some internal conflict. Finely, he got up and gently spoke to the woman in a language I have never heard before, especially from my own father! It had an odd guttural cadence to it, but there were some words that were vaguely Italian - except for missing their ending vowels. And some of their beginning vowels. Weird. That was my first introduction to Romagnol. Anyway, the woman had missed a connecting flight to Pittsburg to visit her brother. My father acted as an interpreter for the airline and got her on the next flight. When his cousin and her husband arrived, they all spoke Italian, but when my father was alone with Vilma, they switched back to that same odd language. I never knew anything about other languages in Italy.
@@ferruccioveglio8090 His mother was from a tiny village in the Aosta valley. When my father was about 7 years old, they moved from New York back to Cesena. My Grandmother was very lonely and alone at the time. No one in Cesena spoke standard Italian, and certainly no one could speak arbitan. She could not communicate with her in-laws. She was much happier after they returned to New York.
My husband and I are strongly considering retiring in Italy. Both my grandparents have immigrated to the USA from Sicily. This was one of my questions, so this was a perfect video for me.
It's interesting to see the difference between the treatment of Italian regional languages and Spanish ones. In Catalunya Catalan is held in high regards, with the majority of their education being in Catalan. Even in university there are many classes taught in Catalan.
It's difficult to find materials for the regional languages also because they tend to vary - even if only a little - from town to town. It can be the intonation, some words, or some grammar, but, as someone born and raised in the Vicenza province, there's a difference in the Venetian spoken within the different areas/towns. That difference only becomes greater between different provinces, so I also think it wouldn't be very useful to learn a regional language if it isn't just for fun or because you live or have family/friends in that particular region. There's also to consider that these regional languages are, unfortunately, dying, with less and less younger people able to speak them...
Young Italians, with few exceptions, now speak a very bad Italian, very ungrammatical and full of incorrect anglicisms. Even dialects are being lost. It's a shame. This loss is a cultural impoverishment. Internal immigration, after the unification of Italy, has "mixed" peoples and unfortunately local traditions and identity languages are being lost. I am of Venetian origin, but born and raised in Turin. Here I don't speak Venetian or Piedmontese with my husband, who was born in Rome, but has Calabrian origins. For many Italians today it is like this. Do you understand what a mess? (I apologize for my terrible English).
@eleonorabrusadelli3470 Regarding your English, you have absolutely nothing to apologize for. Your English is excellent. I wish my Italian were that good.
Great video as always Raffaello! Standard Italian > Genoese > Sicilian > Napolitan it shall be then. Also, would be incredibly interesting to watch you teach a bit of sicilian. I do have a question though, that maybe you could make a video about someday. You mentioned how Sicilian and Friulan are unintelligible (which makes sense given how one is Italo-Dalmatian and the other Gallo-Italian). I however know that genoese, piemontese, lombard, emilian and romagnol are intelligible with one another. So I wonder how close are Sicilian and Napolitan. For instance, I, as a catalan speaker, can understand occitan speakers from Provence perfectly. I wonder if Napolitan and Sicilian are intelligible, what are the similarities and differences. I believe you, as a sicilian speaker who has lived in Naples could cover that question quite well.
Also you could do a video on the arabic influence of Sicilian (maybe even throw in the influence catalan, spanish and french have had from the times of the Crown of Aragon and french rule).
ehr... nope as a Romagnol native speaker (from that little Asterix village near Rimini) and having spent a fair amount of time around Italy (minus the major islands, though I have friends from there) I can tell you that just the northern Gallo-Italian group has a fair amount of difference inside languages, quite like Iberian languages themselves. One of the "incident" I had in Bologna (border Emilian, not even inner Emilian like Reggian or Modenese) was having a coffee in a bar and be disoriented at trying to understand what the elders behind me were talking about. Venetian? text please Piedmontese? text and a pronunciation guide (they go quite creative with wovels) Friulan? all those summers spent hiking at the dolomites did helped, Ladin as well Everything south of Rome is deeply different, yet a trained ear could quite sort at least at sub-regional level the variants; as an example I studied at university with 4 others from Southern Italy which on paper should have spoken the same language (Neapolitan) yet I was quite sure which one was from the Adriatic coast, who from the middle of Appennines and who was actually from Naples. Italy is a linguistically rich country, yet this cultural treasure doesn't get the attention it deserves (or even worse, it gets attention from those who should just keep their tentacles away)
I will say learning Standard Italian or heck the Standard of said Language is the way to go and other regional languages you learn them if you live in a specific region. Like if you move to Sicily you will probably pick up Sicilian for example. But because Standard Italian itself is a releatively recent language there's probably more differences between regional languages.
@@FlagAnthem I see, I seem to have misjudged the similarity amongst gallo-italic languages. I didnt mention venetian because I am aware venetian is a "nope" in terms of intelligibility 😂. But I have been exposed to Lombard (Im Swiss), a little bit of Genoese (through family) and Piemontese (coincidentally), and I understood all 3 fairly well just by speaking Catalan. So I guess those 3 in particular are most similar. Granted, I didn't mean to say they are identical, but as you have stated, like the Iberian languages (portuguese/galician, asturian, and spanish), or the occitano-romance languages (catalan, lengadocian, gascon, provenzal, auvernhon), or even the oïl languages (norman, french, gallo, tourangeois), I do imagine they are at least similar enough to, with a bit of effort, understand each other. Or are they really all that different?
@@alejandror.planas9802 oh yes. I had a friend from Bologna who was into HEMA to the point of reading rrnaissance essays on swordfighting in Catalan. His "trick" was: just think it is Lombard. So yeah, I can see how you cracked northern languages "the other way"
When I stayed a couple of weeks in Italy, it was in Friuli Regione.. I only knew destra e sinestra, at the time. I knew some German and the shop keepers up north could talk a little. I stayed in Maiano (a very small town). The older folks spoke Furlan..everyone could speak standard Italian. TV even had Italian subtitles for programs from Rome...as the Roman dialect was not easy for them to understand. I also visited Genoa and Venice which had very interesting speaking.
Oh, Furlan is one of the most difficult and different ones. I live in Caserta and the Neapolitan language spoken in Naples and the one spoken in Caserta are quite different. I guess if I'd ever go there, I won't understand much.
Maybe you saw the FGV version of Rai, the national broadcaster, which guarantees to special broadcasts in local languages, as FGV is recognized as multi language area. What year you've been there?
I speak a standard Italian to a basic level, but I want to learn Tuscan Dialect to more "match" what my grandfather would have spoken at home growing up.
I would say the main problem of learning those regional dialects, from the point of view of a foreigner being outside Italy, it is to find a lot of learning material, such as grammar, dictionary, conversion guides, etc. Of course today we may find several videos on youtube, but that would take a lot of time to search them (how to know if those are good material among the found one, if found something?) and demands a huge effort doing such searches
I, a Dane, have a holiday home in Liguria. My italian is very limited but I get by. In my village people say “salve” insted of “chaio”, so I say salve to. I i don¨t know if this regional or or just oldfashioned.
Even within regions there are so many varieties! I've heard Sicilians and Calabrians say "what do you want?" (che vuoi?) as either chi voi, chi buoi, chi vui, etc. And that's just within two adjacent regions. In some dialects the snarl or slurring of words can often remove meaning, like in voi/vuoi, not to mention the confusion when it comes to speaking formally: do you use lei; or voi? Vui, or vossia? The benefit of linguistic standardisation is that there is a *standard*, though it does make me sad to think dialects seem to be fading faster in Italy than they are among diasporic Italian communities.
I've been speaking Sicilian since childhood (Palermitano), we usually say "chi buoi?" and "vossia" I found is now considered very old fashioned and is rarely used. I use many old words that aren't used much anymore. I once referred to la cisterna as "a gebbia" which I believe has Arab roots and they looked at me as if I was from another century. I do agree that the dialects are sadly fading. In Sicily, with each generation,more and more of the old words and phrases are being replaced by Italian
My grandmother is Ladin from a small village in the province of Belluno and speaks Ladin, Italian and German She moved to Austria in the 1950's to marry an Austrian man. My dad still understands ladin but doesn't really speak it and my siblings and I didn't grow up with any of that. He did teach us a bit of italian, and maybe a few ladin words, but that's it. We only spoke German at home. But this is really sad, because I love the way ladin sounds so much and like you said, which resources should I use for learning it and then, after having learnt it, what's the use?
witch kinds of ladin spoke your mother ? i can spoke in friulano ( ladino retico or ladino geltico ) as similar to ladino spoken in moena or better in val di fassa
The fact they are even called "dialects" instead of sister languages in many examples, is a reflection of current linguistic classification. If it's a language inside a country, it's called a dialect. For example, what we call "the Italian dialect" in my native region of southern Brazil is a dialect of Venetian, with some Portuguese mixed in (especially for the words that still didn't exist at the time). You can't understand an Italian if you speak Brazilian Venetian, and vice-versa.
@@kekeke8988 - That reminds of a Portuguese friend in America who was born & raised in Portugal. By chance he came across some Portuguese construction workers & when conversing with the boss he wanted to know who his workers are from since he couldn't understand them when talking & the boss said they are from Southern Portugal. Enough said about the Portuguese language.
I know it's been a while, but I cast my vote for a short video of Furlan. My Mom was from Venzone, but as an immigrant to the US, she wanted to make sure that I learned English. I never took the opportunity to learn Furlan from her while she was alive.
Thank you metatron to mention Sardinian. I am Sardinian but never learned how to speak the Sardinian language properly because we are not taught any of it in school. I think it is a shame that some people in Sardinia consider our language as awkward to speak because it's usually linked to rural lifestyle. Now that I'm learning Japanese in university I strangely feel the need to learn my regional language more than ever, even though it might be very difficult as Sardinian has also its own dialects or in some cases full on languages, for example Sardinian spoken in the north would be very hard to understand in the south. I'll try my best anyways and I hope many more people will get interested about regional languages in Italy as we need to cherish our local cultural diversity and way to speak.
I also am Sardinian and I do speak my mother tongue fluently, since I come from the most conservative part of the island (in terms of language), which is Barbagia. If you're interested, I'm offering lessons. I just started yesterday after a dude commented on a video I posted lol
Don't blame school, blame family. Sardinian and dialect are languages for close relations. It might be useful to study local languages at school, but only to understand the culture and learn the orthography. It should be the parents who teach you Sardinian, not the school, because this local language is really a 'family language', in the good sense of the term, and if you do not practise it at home, it is quite useless to study it at school, because there is the lack of literature and because Sardinian also has its own dialect that changes depending on the area. and some specific forms are spread between family uses. I can tell you by experience. But I really hope that in some way italian local languages be studied and preserved at school. I hate the fact my nephews can't speak dialects, just because the stupidity of my brothers.
Sardinian is a romance language (with different variants like Campidanese, lugudorese ECT ) and it is recognized by UNESCO as a endangered language. As such it should be taught in Sardinian schools. For many years, expecially during the 50' and 60' we were taught to be ashamed of our language. No more
@@stefmel5897 you told it. The problem is people don’t speaking. Even Italian and geography (and geography isn’t!) should be learned at school, but local language officially recognised by UNESCO, should be preserved by social environment. Or do we study Italian cuisine or the art of building dry walls at school? For me, it’s fine
Raff, I would really enjoy a mini corse on the Sicilian language. I think it will help me in my future visits to the mother country. My grandpa immigrated from Sicily, San Pier Niceto, specifically. I’m glad I finally found your second channel, more of your great content to devour!
I'm Italian American & I visited visited Sicily three times. Being there I talked to a Sicilian & asked why no one speaks Sicilian. The Sicilian said only "old people speak Sicilian). But apparently the Sicilians do understand & can understand the Sicilian language but now they only speak the Italian national language.
My dad is a huge fan of AC Milan. He even named me Milan as a middle name. The idea of going to Milan, speaking Milanese, and introducing myself as Milan is too funny for me to choose any other dialect or standard Italian.
Actually in Milan very few people can speak Milanese, if not few words. This is due to the strong migration from other parts of Italy. I myself, who was born in Milan, but have Neapolitans parents, can understand Milanese, but do not speak it. As a matter of fact i can understand Neapolitan as well (and maybe even a little better than Milanese), but, again, I do not speak it. When I was a child (and it was many years ago) just older people spoke Milanese and evenctually those few people became fewer and fewer. Of course if you grow up in Milan you're gonna take the local accent, but hardly you're gonna learn and speak Milanese dialect. Unlike (almost) any other place in Italy.
Hi, your father is great, I respect him 👍 I was born and live in Milan, here no one speaks dialect anymore except for a few rare exceptions.Forza Milan😜
A video on dialect vs. language would be interesting. My parents both grew up with Mennonite Low German as their first language, and I can understand it fairly well. Part of me thinks that it's just a dialect, but it really is its own language, somewhere between High German and Dutch.
once you said you've been to Friuli it made me think of Pordenone, great place. The only particular idiom I can recall from the area is "dio cane" except they don't really pronounce the e
Corsican and Sardinian have high intelligibility with Italian and are separate languages and sisters of Italian that can be used in Italy and understood well. Even in France, Corsican and Sardinian have prestige as Romance languages outside of Europe. Now of course, for those who don't have the chance to learn Sardinian and Corsican, follow the advice in the video, learn Italian and then the regional languages of Italy to avoid any problems.
@@ferruccioveglio8090 I didn't talk about every type of Sardinian, I talked about the unified Sardinian that already has the influence of Italian for intelligibility and communication purposes, this same type of Sardinian is intelligible with Corsican. Your speech already comments on the traditional regional and isolated Sardinian, which is not close to either Corsican or Italian. I did not mention this modality because it is not related to other Romance languages, which is not culturally productive. I'd talked about only Unified Sardinian in terms or communication to Corsican and Italian. Goodbye 👋🫂.
My boyfriend is half Italian. The Sicilian kind. I want to learn Italian as well. Unfortunately, he only knows a little as his mom figured in America English would work better. I also have some Sicilian floating around (great grandma)
you'd better look for another thing to achieve. Every dialect is very hard in it's own way, it doesn't have a standardized form as a language has, istead the dialect changes a bit as you move from an area to another every few kms (between Alps, you just need to cross 1 single mountain and you can find a completely different dialect on the other side). The language that is spoken in my area is not too different from Italian as I live quite near to tuscany, but it takes about 55 sounds to pronounce it correctly, and you can't get even 1 of those sounds wrong or, the few people still able to use the dialect, will immediatly notice you are not from Bologna and just switch to standard italian.
I love your dream, but you should give the whole life just to try to do that. Normally an italian can speak just two dialects, because dialect conditions the way Italian is spoken, and eventually, one of the two prevails in everyday speech. But italians can mimic very good others regional accents. Fun fact: every variation of italian (in vowels, consonants sounds, double consonants, etc) has is opposite in another accent. For example: Sardinian people tent to double consonants even if singular, while Veneti people are very bad on pronouncing double consonants.
So, I became interested in Neapolitan because my great great grandparents came from Potenza. Yes, I know Potenza in Basilicata, but as far as I understand, Lucano is a dialect or variety of the Nnapulitano , and since there are already some video content of Neapolitan, I decided to go for that one.
I learn standard Italian, I have distant Italian origin apparently from Sardinia.I like the jackal canal they re super funny and they speak a mixture of italien and napolitan. Sicilian language with his bunch of influence could be interesting because there are many people from Sicily. If I speak Italian they are happy and if I put some Sicilian words that probably make me more friendly for them.
being corsican sicilian i can speak corsican pretty well and i actually learned it before italian when my girlfriend who his from Naples can understand it quite well since she's a fluent speaker of italian but i cannot understand napolitan
Right on. I lived in the north learned basic Italian but was close to a family and some small towns, which I didn't realize how much was regional language until going to Rome for a bit.
I'm wondering if in Italy you have the same sort of situation as we have here with our Dutch dialect (West-Flanders region). Here the dialect can change abruptly in the course of 10-15 km. The basics are the same, but vocabulary, pronounciation and idioms can vary wildly. One time when I was a lot younger, I heard a song in a more southern version of our dialect and I though it was someone not from the region doing a very poor imitation..
some regional languages can get really decentralized, not mentioning some alpine communities when some languages actually survives in sparse villages only.
Much more different. The Italian Peninsula didn't have a unified Language until the mid 19th century and even then it's not entirely unified with many Italians having more attachment to their region over the country as a whole.
@@Epsilonsama yes it did. From Alps to sicily administation and culture was thaught and written in Italian with a fair diglossia level among people. The first Italian full dictionary is from early 1600s Why people still think Italian sort of popped up from nothing after 1861?
@@FlagAnthem I doubt that dictionary was titled "the Italian full dictionary" It must've specified it's Tuscan, of that it's a Standard, because back then that's what it was. A refined, manufactured Tuscan with no native speakers. And over time it just got more and more artificial in many ways. Did you know that by the 7th century no one ever said "lingua"? Latin was still spoken, mind you, but native Latin speakers read that as lengua. And in Italy too it was lengua, straight from Late Latin. Standard Italian sort of reversed it to seem similar to Classical Latin. This language only gained traction out of the very well educated and eventually pushed all over Italy, as you said, since the 1860s.
@@FlagAnthem Btw I'm not criticizing, a national language is useful and such "regressions" to classical Latin are also seen in Spanish, for example. For instance, every word in Spanish where you see a CT together it's likely one of those. Or the GN, which in Late Latin should've started turning into something that sounds like Italian in some Spanish words it returned to a separate G+N. Signo, meaning sign, is one of those. It should've been Siño but it got changed. Spanish doesn't have as many though because it was too focused on purging Arabic loanwords lmao.
I thought the time I was near Bari, when I heard the unclenof my friend speaking Barese dialect 😂 As a romagnolo it seemed a mix of arabic and swiss-german to me
A perfect statement of the facts. Here in Lombardy where I live, there is no standard regional language, but rather each municipality (comune) has its own dialect. Milanese dialect is the best documented, but it differs a lot from the Eastern Lombard Dialects of Bergamo, Brescia and Crema. Bergamasque is difficult to understand, so you have a situation like Spanish and Portuguese. The Portuguese (Bergamasque) understand the Spanish (Milanese), but not vice versa. For a sample of Bergamasque, see the film "Albero degli zoccoli" with subtitles in Italian. :-) The strongest regional language in Northern Italy is Veneto (Venice, Padua, Verona, etc.) and they are trying to develop a standard language. The regional language of Piedmont is well documented with a grammar and dictionary, but not accepted by everyone outside of Turin. A complicated situation.
Yeah I didn't realise how different they are my dad always told me the Comascan dialect had a very distinct word for flower but the Google translate Lombard's word was identical to Italian which dialect is it even based on
@@Joseph-pz5bo To say the truth, even within the province of Como, as in all the other Lombard provinces, the dialect varies, to a greater or lesser extent, from parish to parish. // The city has its own dialect, while the Lake has another called "laghee" and the part toward Milan (La Brianza) another. But, generally speaking, Comasco is similar to Milanese on the South and Mendrisiotto (Ticino, Switzerland) on the North. // Here is a sample of Comasco with the word flower: Åpril ål fa i FIUR, magg i'a culura. Aprile fa i fiori, maggio li colora. (April produces the flowers and May colors them.) The word "fiur" vs. IT "fiore" is the most common I think, unless you are referring to a specific flower. // Lecco used to be part of Como province and the dialect changes rapidly Between Lecco and Pontida, where it is fully Bergamasque, For example, five in Como or Lecco is "cinch" pronounced "chink". In different Bergamasque dialects, it can be "sinch", "sich", or "hic" pron. "sink", "sick" or "hick". Five flowers could be: Como. "cinch fiur", Bergamo: "hic fiur", all rather different from Italian "cinque fiori". ;-)
My favorite words in an Italian dialect are nicu and nicùzzu because they are very similar to the Romanian micu(l) and micuțu(l) (I put the l's in parentheses because many don't pronounce the final l's). Etymologycally they both come the the Greek "mikkos"
@@FlagAnthemnicu/nicuzzu is not Sardinian. It's sicilian and It means small. In sicilian words end in -u instead of -o . Marco=Marcu Oro=Oru Metto=Mettu
Italian dialects are great fun! I especially love dialectal proverbs. One of my favorites is: "Anch quésta l'è fatta dess quél ch' cavò i uc' a so muier" (bolognese) "That too is done, said the one who gouged out his wife's eyes" (It is said in reference to an action completed with satisfaction) It's more a wellerism than a real proverb but it always makes me laugh!
Da bôn! Un forester al g'ha da imparà l'italiàn prima da druá una lëingua regiunàl. Imparä un dialëtt l'è sa mò dificil per nüätar, figürat par un inglès o un tudësc. Spero di averlo scritto bene, chiedo scusa a mio nonno se delle volte ho sbagliato qualcosa 🤣. (Delle volte è un pieno dialettismo tra l'altro)
Its basically the same, but even in italian switzerland they have a "dialect", wich is actually a variety of lombard. Italian was sort of taught to a lot of people, in the same way that french was not really spoken in french switzerland, because the majority of the population spoke franco-provençal (aka arpitan, sometimes called patois), wich is not french
My mother has learned standard Italian, but her teacher was from Piemonte region, and south of about Rome, she was having difficulties communicating with the locals
Great Page! Im a big fan of linguistic and Eptymology in general. I dont have the aptitude and time for one second language. But how they morph and adapt interest me.
My mum's family is Sardinian. When we moved to Sardinia I could barely understand elderly people there since they spoke regional Sardinian dialects. I got told it is more of a combination of Arabic, Latin and Spanish than Italian. In fact, my mum had no trouble speaking to and understanding people when she visited Spain because her knowledge of Sardinian helped her out a lot. That said I also had trouble understanding anyone in Piemonte speaking their own dialect there. It's quite interesting to see how different it can be!
The piemontese languages have been heavily influenced by occitan, whilst the Sardiniana have been influenced more by Latin than anything else, thus you can see how you're not going to understand one while only knowing the other
@@diegone080 non è possibile dire quale lingua sia più vicina al latino, poiché le lingue non funzionano proprio così (per quanto ne so) Ha sicuramente mantenuto, però, un vocabolario più vicino al latino di altre lingue
@@diegone080 da tempo gira sui social una sorta di manifesto qualunquista, dove si vorrebbe qualificare il sardo come un fantasioso miscuglio, comprendente l’arabo che ovviamente non c’entra nulla, niente di strano che qualcuno ci creda e poi lo spieghi anche ad altri. Anche io sono sarda, dalle mie parti si parla il campidanese, ho fortissimi problemi a capire chi parla davvero in sardo, in genere gli anziani.
I can remember a few words in Romagnol from my friend in Cesena. My favorite is the Romagnol word for thunderstorm: Scarvaz! (Great word! I use it all the time. Friends think I'm nuts). I noticed that Romagnol tends to eliminate ending and beginning vowels in some words: Ospedale (hospital) becomes spedal, il cane (the dog) could be le can, e can, le ca, e ca or the French le chien. Every town and village would have their own variety.
I love Italy's diversity. Such a beauty of a country every region has its own customs, values, history, cuisine along with its own language. Centre of Europe.
Many are dieing out. The oldest generation is fluent in the village language but people 40 and below have moved and are familiar but is less and less among family members.
Metaboy, do you think Tuscan should have been the dominant Latin child-language out of it and all of it's siblings? Any other thoughts on this, like, for example, would there be a runner up if you think the Tuscan dialect is the best choice?
Studied Standard Italian. Then met my Northern Tuscan husband who speaks a version of Emilian with all his family. That took me 17 years to understand😂 Now obsessed with Napoletano after watching My Brilliant Friend and Gomorrah. This was the dialect I heard growing up in Queens NY.
Thank you for your suggestion to learn Italian standard. I would be interested in a mini-course in Sicilian but I would like you to explore, as you see fit, the many versions of Sicilian and perhaps reasons why certain pronunciations developed in different regions of the island. West vs east, coastal vs interior, etc....
Common rules to speak roman dialect 1 if you see a double R, pronounce only one 2 say “Ao” and “Daje” more often than you breathe 3 use a rude tone, even if you’re talking about how cute your puppy is 4 (optional) choose a Roman Football team and be angry, violent and stupid about it Congrats, you can speak roman dialect now.
Coming from English and learning Italian in middle age it is extremely difficult. My grandfather spoke standard Italian, my great grandfather Neapolitan but later also standard Italian as I remember my great grandfather and grandpa talking in Italian in the 80s. I recently became a dual citizen and have been studying Italian for the past several years largely teaching myself. Im at the stage where I need live classes to get better at using it with natives at a grown up pace. When I was in Italy I understood it if it was spoken slowly but as soon as they started conjugating quickly and talking like - well an adult instead of someone in an easy reader book it got rough real quick. I can order drinks, ask for directions, etc. funny enough no matter how many times I asked for coffee to go they all tried to resist giving me a to go cup. They’d give it to me but they all had a horrified look on their face 😂
I was born and lived in Napoli, but learned only Standard Italian. I didn't learn how to speak proper Neapolitan until I was in my early teens. I then moved to the USA when I was in 8th grade, not knowing any English, but which I mastered quite rapidly. One time I was asked by my 9th grade teacher to translate for another newly arrived Italian kid, who didn't know any English and was having a rough time. I tried to speak to him, but all I got was that his name was Giovanni and that he was from Bari. The kid spoke strictly in dialect and I only spoke Italian so I guess he understood me, but I sure couldn't understand him. My teacher was puzzled as to how two Italians couldn't understand one another. I was a bit puzzled myself, because I recall telling her, "Miss, I don't know what he's saying, but he's not speaking Italian." She looked at me as if I were crazy! 😅😊
Oh boy, Barese is some of S tier difficulty to me XD
The real mystery is how Apulia dialects proper are considered, linguistically, local dialects of Neapolitan, when only the northern one are really similar to Neapolitan and from Cerignola down south they're utterly incomprehensible to Neapolitans.
I'd say they evolved from a quite different form of speech than that which ended up as Neapolitan and similar dialects, which are heirs to Oscan forms of Latin. Apulia hosted non-Italic populations (branches of Illyrians) originally.
Maybe this could be useful for you to know. It's called Neapolitan not in relation to the city of Naples but in relation to the Kingdom of Naples, which of course included the Puglia region
American are so sophisticated
This reminds me when I was in the 5th grade. We got a kid from Portugal, and he didn't speak English at all so they had a girl who could speak Spanish to translate for him.
I am fluent in English, Italian Spanish and a dialect of calabria. There is a dialect of calabria that is an old griko that dates back to the magna grecia. It has since become extinct even in Greece and isn't spoken much by youth from what I understand so once the elderly speakers pass on it will be a defunct language. I believe archeologists/historians used the dialect to decipher old texts from the magna grecia. I wish I had the opportunity and time to learn this language/dialect and hear it spoken amongst the elders. Cheers
I had the good fortune of being immersed in Italian when visiting with a friend and her family in the North of Italy. Speaking conversational Spanish and a bit of French, I find it a bit easy to understand standard Italian and so was enjoying trying to converse as I listened and learned from my hosts.
One day I was introduced to an aunt I had not met yet and in exchange for my greeting she said something I could not understand at all and the. Asked a question I could not understand with exception of the word “dialetto”. I was shock that the “dialect” there was so incomprehensible to me and have been fascinated with “dialetti” since! Absolutely amazing how diverse Italy is linguistically.
As another Spanish speaker Italian is surprisingly inteligible with our native tongue. Not as close as Portuguese of course but very close still. I'm definitely interested more with Italian "dialects" for sure.
It's really a reflection of the post-Roman period. Italy was never a single nation after that, all the way to the early modern period.
¿Te estaban hablando en lombardo o laghèe?, porque en mi familia es igual, un tío tenía que literalmente traducir absolutamente todo porque lo único que hablaba era dialecto.
British guy that lives in Taranto here. It’s exactly how he says. Generally I started out learning Italian, then my colleagues inserted the odd few words into conversation so I picked those up, and then they start to speak more in Tarantino. A couple of little phrases I learned are like this:
Fa caldo: f sc’ cavd
Fa freddo: f sc’ frid
Ora andiamo a magiare: mo ama sce mangia
Che cazzo vuoi: c’è ue 🤌🏼
Andiamo: schiamn
Living in Taranto? Oh man :'(
Please do the deep dive on the differences between dialects and languages, that sounds extremely interesting. I'm very much enjoying this channel Metatron.
I second this. I'm so invested in the technicalities now, please teach us!
Dialects are to a language what tinctures and shades are to colours.
Even (standard) Italian has its own variants
Oh that's a pretty easy question I know the answer of.
Answer: There's none. It's a political distinction. The word language carries prestige and dialect doesn't.
There's more to talk about like some examples of dialects which are utterly incomprehensible to each other and as far apart as German and English are, and languages that are considered separate but are in reality closer than New York English is to Boston English.
Let me answer with a historical parallel: when Yugoslavia was a single country, all the variants of Serbo-Croatian language were not called languages. Today, each of the independent countries claims its variant as a language: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin. Now think that Italian local languages are MUCH more different from one another than those variants of Serbo-Croatian. What do they lack to be considered languages? Recognition and status from being an official language of a country. Some exceptions are Sardinian, Ladin and Friulian that are indeed officially recognized, because they are so different from standard Italian.
As far as I remember, he did make such a video in the past, like couple of years ago
I learned standard Italian and lived in both Sardinia and Sicily. I found that most local Italian speakers will sprinkle local words into their speech so I would pick up words that way and I would occasionally use those words. Words like the local version of andiamo or figlia or flglio. For a period of time, I had an email address where my email name was my name, but with the Sardinian modifier "eddu" at the end for 'little".
I was quite surrounded by different Italian accents when growing up: my grandpa was born in Sicily, my grandma was born in Marche, in the 1950s they moved to Sardegna, where my father and his siblings were born, and then the whole family moved to Milan and later, one of my uncles moved to Rome.
My grandma used to tell me how Rai, along with school programs, played a rather big role in spreading Italian through the peninsula after WW2, an Italian which, despite coming from Florence, had some influences from Milan and Rome as well.
That's why I say italian kids are born trilingual:
Italian, Mom dialect, Dad dialect (+1 bonus dialect if shared home wirh grandparents)
RAI played a great role indeed. Standard Italian derives from hundreds of years of a so called "pulitura della lingua", a cleaning of various aspects dated back from Dante to Alessandro Manzoni, to name the most important writers in this subject. In the '50 RAI TV, the national public broadcaster, aired the program "Non è mai troppo tardi" (It is never too late) which purpose was to teach middle aged men and women, who only spoke their dialects, the Standard. It was so well done that Professor Manzi is missed also nowadays.
Oh, and at the end of this video, I'd love to see Metatron collab with XiaomaNYC ❤.
Also it would be awesome if Raffaello will have a video about the "sciacquare i panni in Arno". I am sure he knows quite a few about that!
The sad thing is, the so called dialects became unacceptable in many regions before, during and post ww2. I'm Sardinian and my granma from the maternal side never wanted her daughters to speak Sardinian even at home (my mom and aunts grew up in Switzerland until pre-teen then the family moved back to Sardinia in the 70's), even if granny was not well spoken in italian (she only went to school until third grade. then ww2 broke). My paternal side of the family on the other hand speaks very good Sardinian and Italian, so I grew up with my dad almost never using Sardinian because of my mother, and I'm the only one of three kids that speaks Sardinian, because by the time my siblings were born my grans had died or had severe impairments. I ended up acing french and english classes in middle school, studying ancient greek and latin in highscool, Mandarin at Uni and having a huge interest in languages, while my siblings never had what I think is the huge advantage of growing up multilingual: elasticity. Let aside the fact that culture is passed on by language and we should cherish all diversity.
You are going to make me finally learn a language, thanks for all your videos man
My very pleasure
Learned Italian at school, teacher was from Sardinian, but we learned neutral Italian. Fast forward many years, my kids traveled to Bergamo in the north, their Italian from school (same school) got them through.😊
I'm studying Standard Italian but have a fascination for Piemontese, partly due to my interest in traditional music - there are a few resources that I've found, including Italian-Piemontese dictionaries.
Glad we are noble ones again. Anyone studying the beautiful and historic language of Italian is noble.
Greetings! I'm an American of Italian ancestry: Sicilian, Neapolitan, and Barese. The first time I traveled in Italy, I had learned Standard Italian. While in Italy I easily picked up Neapolitan after constantly hearing it in Caserta. When I was in Bari, my relatives would sometimes speak in Barese: I was astonished by the pronunciation which reminded me very much of English Cockney. I didn't understand what was said, but I felt as if I were in some part of England. I wonder if this is due to the Norman conquest. Did the Normans bring the same sounds to Southern Italy as they did to England???
Can you give a more in-depth explication of the differences in grammar and pronunciation between Italian, Siciliaan and Friulian and give us some sample sentences?
A noted Yiddishist, Max Weinreich, had once said, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."
Which is meaningless, and even contradictory if you consider how a language is a group of linguistic systems (aka dialects) with shared morphology, syntaxis and mutual intellegibillity.
Tuscan is a language encompassing Florentine, Senese and Livornese (and by heavens DO NOT try to put these people in the ssme room, at least without a comfy seat with popcorn). Italian itself has its own proper dialect (just ask around what was the fuss with #escile)
@@FlagAnthem The distinction itself is meaningless. Talking about languages and dialects is a political move.
I've seen more difference within Arabic and within Norwegian than I've seen between Swedish & Danish. Or Serbian and Croatian.
Some Chinese dialects are as far apart as Russian is to English yet they often consider them dialects of Chinese.
It's all nonsense, even the etymology suggests the same roots meaning "way of speaking"
If it was up to ME, I'd call each dialect a language and be done with it. Yeah there are tens of thousands of languages around the world, fine by me, but there are millions of towns and cities, it's expected.
@@crusaderACRo it isn't.
Dialect is to language what a shade is to colours.
Status itself is nonsense
You wouldn't call Latin or Irish dialects
And you wouldn't argue americans canadians and australians speaking other languages rather than variants of English (unless you want to get political, so...)
@@FlagAnthem Shades and colors are just as made up by consensus, except more.
If you ask an Italian what color is the shirt of their soccer team, they'll refuse to call it blue. It's light blue. Light blue is a shade in English but in Italian it's a different word and a different color altogether.
In English, orange was a shade of brown (or red) until a few centuries ago. Remnants of this are seen in the name of the red fox, that fox is clearly orange isn't it?
Also Latin was certainly considered a dialect. I'm Hispanic, and guess how Spanish speakers called Latin class in the 10th century, when it was much closer to Caesar's Latin? Grammar class. Because you studied the "old" grammar, the language was the same. In fact, we called it grammar class until the 20th century, funnily enough.
The first bible in "Spanish" was in the early renaissance and called "Biblia romanceada". Not Spanish.
Edit: Romanceado means like, "roman'd" or "made into a more roman style" because it was a "translation" from the 5th century Latin Vulgate into how modern "romans" actually spoke.
@@crusaderACR exactly italian it was imposed over other regional lenguage sometime older than (florentian of 1300 or italiano standard ) friulano kowm like minoritarian lenguage is born arround 1000 A.C. Ventian lenguage was used like english now in all mediterranen lands for a busines arts commerce etc.
This video should be watched in tandem with your excellent "8 Italian accents" video that I often revisit!
My parents are from Abruzzo. That was the only Italian I was exposed to. When I was finally united with my relatives in Italy, I thanked them for hosting my new husband and I. A distant second aunt, clapped her hands and called out, she even thanked us in Lancianese ( local dialect) . It was all I knew. A year later I was Rome and thought wow, my Italian is very bad. I keep getting confused looks when I speak. That was when I found out, I could speak and understand Lancianese and that it really was different than standard Italian. I explained it to my son that trying to understand and speak standard Italian was like doing so through lots of static. But understanding my family’s dialect was a crystal clear signal. 😂
My grandparents were and mom is Sicilian, and im still studying both italian and sicilian (from catania more specifically Randazzo) because i always refused to learn when i was a kid. I’m only around high a2 or low b1 level in italian. I chose to learn japanese for 6 years instead and got JLPT N1 and some other certificates. It feels weird that im able to speak way better in japanese than italian, since all of my family is italian. I feel like a shame to my family so I’m making sure I don’t give up
I advise you to watch some all time movie greats in Italian dub, as the Italian dub is one of the greatest you'll ever hear. (The godfather is perfect) good luck with your learning! :)
Do one about all the different variations of Sicilian
He could start from the arancino/arancina civil war
A small lesson in Sicilian would be excellent
aiu a mincia ca marriva na vucca
@@Drudolo Mizzica, hai 'na minchia ca finisci ntâ tô bucca? ... e jèu nd'haju 'na ugna (mignolo) lunga 6 cm 😂
Jèu sugnu 'nu Sicilianu
For someone who speak well 4 latin origin languages (native french, fluent spanish portuguese italian)
The nothern dialects to me really look like a evil french dude tried to frenchified italian 😂
And southern dialects its like a crazy dude stoled random spanish portuguese french words. And italianized it 😂
My father was from Pinerolo, and he spoke Italian and Piedmontese. For many years I thought it was just an accent/dialect of italian as most dialects is a variation of the same language. And everybody refered to it as a "dialect" wich to me does not mean another language. All dialects (labeled dialects) save for one (Älvdalska), here in Sweden is actual standard Swedish with some regional words and pronounciation/sound differences. And Älvdalska at least in part is clearly related to Swedish even though it is so different.
I don't speak Italian myself but knowing portuguese and also being around italian a bit more I understand 50-60% of it. I was in my teens before I realised when he spoke on the phone with my aunt one day that it's not even close. Norwegian is closer to Swedish than Piedmontese is to Italian imo.
Piedmontese looks to me to be like a mismash of latin, french, german and some slavic language spoken with italian and basque sounds. 😅
from a Triestino, I have to give credit to this Furlan guy. This is one of the best explanation you will find of Italians dialects. Great video, mulon!
The same with English. When I sprinkle my British RP with some Geordie when in Newcastle, Yorkshire when in Sheffield, Scouse when in Liverpool, Scots when in Edinburgh, people seem to love it.
Sono Italo Brasilliano (origine emiliana) e ho vissuto in Italia per quasi 8 anni. Vivevo tra Vicenza e Padova e sono riuscito ad imparare un pò del dialetto Veneto. Non ho avuto tanta difficulta, poi il loro dialetto se assomiglia tantissimo al'italiano, al portoghese e allo spagnolo. Per me è stato una bella esperienza imparare la lingua locale.
brao toso ciò
@@markkraun4472 anca ti situ brao!
Perché tutto gli italo-brasiliani finiscono in Veneto? Sono di Padova e ne conosco almeno 6 di italo-brasiliani😂
@@orfeoassiti6669 , nel mio caso, è perche sono andato a studiare archeologia all'Università di Padova. Gli altri creo che sia per l'origine, pois tanti veneti emigrarono in Brasile.
Fursi parché tanti de nojaltri A semo disendenti de emigrài Veneti 😅 El me triznono el zera Padoàn e la triznona Venesiana
I wanna learn more about the Japanese Plumber that speaks Nepolitano. 😂
Giorno Giovanna?
There has *GOT* to be a Super Mario Brothers joke somewhere in there.
@@rumrunner8019 ohhh okay, i think i get it now 😅😅😂
I'd like a mini course on Sicilian by the Metatron.
your story about the japanese plumber reminds me of the time i met an african man in bavaria, who spoke full on bavarian so much that he couldn't understand high german it was a surreal experience at the time.
Friendly remind that Emilian and Romagnol are NOT the same language
(yes wikipedia, I'm looking at you)
If you are interested in Regional Languages, be careful about what you get offered. True story: got one in chat claiming to speak my "native" regional language (SM Romagnol) when in the end he was tipping in Modenese (a dialect of Emilian). I won't say he wasted his time (chapeau for learning a local language), only it wasn't what he was thinking he was investing his efforts.
It's sh*t like this making even more a nightmare trying to preserve our heritage.
I had no idea they were so different.
I'm living in Sicilia and desperately trying to learn `Italian` but i live in a small village and 90% of them speak Siciliano. So i struggle to listen. They will speak standard Italian to me, but when they chat to each other they revert back. Eventually after i learn Italian, i want to learn the sicilian from my area.
A really interesting, informative and off-beat video on learning Italian. Learning that the dialects were full blown languages was something I didn't know.
This is the same with Arabic, we have to rely on Standard Arabic to communicate bc not only is the regional Arabic different, but often even our local neighboring countries that lie within our own regions differ in understanding. For example, the countries who speak Levantian Arabic (Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan) can sometimes slightly differ amongst themselves, but also greatly differ from the region of North African Arabic (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, West Sahara, Mauritania), the region of Gulf Arabic (Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi, UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen) and the region of African Arabic (Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Chad, Comoros and some parts of other bordering countries). And since Standard Arabic is this sort of ancient language preserved from the 7th century CE, then what it would sound like is if 2 people who speak English were attempting to communicate to each other in a Shakespearean dialect 😂
I've always wanted to learn Sicilian. I don't know why but I've always liked the sound of the language. The food's not bad either.
Why would you want to know a criminal language?
@@Bidenisapedo With a username like this, your comment makes sense.
@@Bidenisapedo 🗿
@@mrtrollnator123 And so are you.
@@kjejon1 ah, thank you!
My grandparents came from Sicily. Oddly my dad learned Italian in America. My mom could not understand my dad when he spoke Italian. When speaking with my mom, he had to speak the Palermo dialect of Sicily.
I always forget people learn languages for business sometimes, I mostly do it for the lulz.
I wanna learn Sicilian now
Agree there. I once worked together with two guys from Sicily and when they talked amongst each other it was kind of a shock to realise how I didn't understand anything. I'm not fluent when speaking (Standard) Italian but can usually understand 99%
Oh and I'd say this is true for most languages. If there is a "standardized" version, learn that first and pick up a/the regional dialect along the way
Excellent video! It brought back memories of stories my father told me about his upbringing. My grandfather came from the town of Cesena, in Romagna where everybody spoke Romagnol (or Romagnolo as you guys insist on calling it). He met my grandmother here in the U.S. but she came from a tiny village in the Aosta valley and spoke a French provencal language, probably vallentain or arbitan. Fortunately my grandfather went to the university in Bologna and was able to speak standard Italian. She also spoke Italian. When my father was growing up, they all spoke standard Italian only when the three of them were together. When it was just my grandfather and my father, they spoke Romagnol, when he was with his mother, they would speak the French provencal language, later my father and grandmother spoke English together. Nonno didn't begin to learn English until late in life. When my father was about 7 years old the family moved back to Cesena for 3 years, around 1923. At that time nobody in Cesena spoke standard Italian. Nonna (we called her, Nonnie) was very lonely in Cesena. She could not communicate at all with her inlaws. She was much happier after they returned to New York. I remember my father telling me that when Nonno first came to New York in 1903, he was very disappointed that most of the Italains living here spoke Sicilian or various Neopolitan languages. He was told that most northern Italians could be found in the Boston area, which is where he met my grandmother.
If you do a mini-course in Sicilian can you do the comparison to standard italian so we can hear the difference whenever you give examples?
Great video. In my town there’s a restaurant owned by a guy from Verona so I learned some Venetian phrases and sprung it on him, he laughed really hard and thought it was great.
My impression is that you should learn standard Italian, but at some point you should learn a little dialect to feel really Italian.
It's pretty similar to linguistic situation in China. After studying Mandarin for a while, I also studied a little bit of Shanghainese. It's fun enough to learn for it's own sake but its real world usage is quite limited. Native Shanghainese might think it's cute or funny but they will still prefer speaking Mandarin to you most of the time. I get the sense that precisely because regional languages are intimate to people, it feels strange to actually talk to some outsider in what's supposed to be the "home language".
Older generation thing too. The old folks in taiwan dont speak mandarin.
Would absolutely LOVE a mini-course or lecture on Sicilian linguistics/ phonology (& the differences between the Palermo dialect vs Syracuse & all the rest) AND one on Neapolitan. Spent 2 weeks along the Amalfi Coast last year, & Sicily 4-5 years ago. Am fascinated by the local language & culture (& they're clearly very ancient cultures & societies, I mean, Naples is 1000 years older than Rome itself), but obviously, not a lot of information in English about it. Molte grazie.
Look for the work of Giuseppe Pitrè. Specifically Fiabe, Novelle E Racconti Popolari Siciliani.
Pitrè was a folklorist who collected different folk tales from across Sicily and wrote a summary of the grammar based on the most common features.
A subtle point not mentioned in this video.
If one learns “Italian” in a specific region-the person learning the language DOES NOT necessarily know s/he is picking up a regional dialect/language. I realized this later in my life that I was using words from the dialect used in Lucca because my mother was speaking to me that way. It was only when I went to school in Pisa (a mere 20km away) that I was using words in “Lucchese.”
Great video and work. Bravissimo. 👏🏻
I went to Friuli (Udine) for a short trip while I was living in Venice and I fell in love with the place 😍
We Raffa, saluti da un friulano!
L'idea di fare un deep dive nei dialetti mi piace un sacco. Dopo che ti ho sentito descrivere l'incomprensione tra il tuo siciliano e il friulano, ti consigio vivamente di guardarti "felici ma furlans" (ha i sottotitoli) e "tacons: perle di friulano" per capire un po' come funziona la lingua della terra dell'alcolismo. Per il resto buona fortuna con il canale, ti ho scoperto di recente ed è subito un subscribe meritato ;)
Attention : Sardinian is not derivative of the Italian Standard language. It's a specific language. The Northern Sardo Corsican dialects (almost 10% of the whole population of Sardinia) are the only languages that can be considered as derivative of Italian...
That's what he said. Also, that counts for other regional languages, like Sicilian, Venetian, Neapolitan or Genoese
Questa cosa vale per praticamente tutti i "dialetti" tranne per quelli mediani (toscano, umbro, laziale, marchigiano, corso e sassarese)
Dunno. I still think we lot should just stop calling them “dialects”, since they literally aren't dialects and this has also damaged their native speakers
Some are so decentralized that are more dialectal systems, this in central Italy is quite strong
Also "dialect" is not a bad word, don't let the glottophobes take away all the fun
@@FlagAnthem Not sure what you mean with decentralised, but yeah I know that in the centre of Italy there mostly are dialects derived from Tuscan.
The word dialect wouldn't be a bad word, if Italians didn't perceive all the regional languages as broken Italian because of it. Most regional languages aren't granted official recognition and natives are damaged by these circumstances, nevertheless we just keep using the word dialect, even when we know it's factually incorrect
@@hashcosmos2181 "decentralized" means that each dialect is quite distant to the point that is difficult to see theklm as variants of one language.
An Emilian speaker from Piacenza and one from Modena may have some difficult to understand one from Bologna or Ferrara
@@hashcosmos2181 honestly, the more we use Dialect with capital D the less hate it will get.
One more story: as a child, growing up in the 1960s, my father who was fluent in Romagnol, standard italian, french and arbitan, was always careful never to speak any foreign language in public. He was always silent when we were together walking around New York. Many years later I found out that the F.B.I. picked him up for investigation at the beginning of W.W.2. He later served in the U.S. Army. One day we went to the airport to pick up his cousin Vilma and her husband. They had just arrived from Cesena, Italy in Romagna. As we were waiting, there was a woman sitting a few feet away who was very distraught and upset. She had just come from Italy apparently and didn't speak English. The airline got an Italian translator, but when she spoke to the woman, they could not understand each other. I was very confused (I was only 10 years old) I couldn't understand why 2 Italians couldn't communicate with each other. I looked over to my father. He looked upset, as though he was struggling with some internal conflict. Finely, he got up and gently spoke to the woman in a language I have never heard before, especially from my own father! It had an odd guttural cadence to it, but there were some words that were vaguely Italian - except for missing their ending vowels. And some of their beginning vowels. Weird. That was my first introduction to Romagnol. Anyway, the woman had missed a connecting flight to Pittsburg to visit her brother. My father acted as an interpreter for the airline and got her on the next flight. When his cousin and her husband arrived, they all spoke Italian, but when my father was alone with Vilma, they switched back to that same odd language. I never knew anything about other languages in Italy.
How did he learn Arpitan? Relatives from Aosta Valley?
@@ferruccioveglio8090 His mother was from a tiny village in the Aosta valley. When my father was about 7 years old, they moved from New York back to Cesena. My Grandmother was very lonely and alone at the time. No one in Cesena spoke standard Italian, and certainly no one could speak arbitan. She could not communicate with her in-laws. She was much happier after they returned to New York.
@@ersikillian Just a little correction: is Arpitan, with the "p".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Provençal
My husband and I are strongly considering retiring in Italy. Both my grandparents have immigrated to the USA from Sicily. This was one of my questions, so this was a perfect video for me.
It's interesting to see the difference between the treatment of Italian regional languages and Spanish ones. In Catalunya Catalan is held in high regards, with the majority of their education being in Catalan. Even in university there are many classes taught in Catalan.
It's difficult to find materials for the regional languages also because they tend to vary - even if only a little - from town to town. It can be the intonation, some words, or some grammar, but, as someone born and raised in the Vicenza province, there's a difference in the Venetian spoken within the different areas/towns.
That difference only becomes greater between different provinces, so I also think it wouldn't be very useful to learn a regional language if it isn't just for fun or because you live or have family/friends in that particular region.
There's also to consider that these regional languages are, unfortunately, dying, with less and less younger people able to speak them...
Young Italians, with few exceptions, now speak a very bad Italian, very ungrammatical and full of incorrect anglicisms. Even dialects are being lost. It's a shame. This loss is a cultural impoverishment. Internal immigration, after the unification of Italy, has "mixed" peoples and unfortunately local traditions and identity languages are being lost. I am of Venetian origin, but born and raised in Turin. Here I don't speak Venetian or Piedmontese with my husband, who was born in Rome, but has Calabrian origins. For many Italians today it is like this. Do you understand what a mess? (I apologize for my terrible English).
Regional languages are built different
@eleonorabrusadelli3470 Regarding your English, you have absolutely nothing to apologize for. Your English is excellent. I wish my Italian were that good.
Great video as always Raffaello! Standard Italian > Genoese > Sicilian > Napolitan it shall be then. Also, would be incredibly interesting to watch you teach a bit of sicilian.
I do have a question though, that maybe you could make a video about someday. You mentioned how Sicilian and Friulan are unintelligible (which makes sense given how one is Italo-Dalmatian and the other Gallo-Italian). I however know that genoese, piemontese, lombard, emilian and romagnol are intelligible with one another. So I wonder how close are Sicilian and Napolitan.
For instance, I, as a catalan speaker, can understand occitan speakers from Provence perfectly. I wonder if Napolitan and Sicilian are intelligible, what are the similarities and differences. I believe you, as a sicilian speaker who has lived in Naples could cover that question quite well.
Also you could do a video on the arabic influence of Sicilian (maybe even throw in the influence catalan, spanish and french have had from the times of the Crown of Aragon and french rule).
ehr... nope
as a Romagnol native speaker (from that little Asterix village near Rimini) and having spent a fair amount of time around Italy (minus the major islands, though I have friends from there) I can tell you that just the northern Gallo-Italian group has a fair amount of difference inside languages, quite like Iberian languages themselves.
One of the "incident" I had in Bologna (border Emilian, not even inner Emilian like Reggian or Modenese) was having a coffee in a bar and be disoriented at trying to understand what the elders behind me were talking about.
Venetian? text please
Piedmontese? text and a pronunciation guide (they go quite creative with wovels)
Friulan? all those summers spent hiking at the dolomites did helped, Ladin as well
Everything south of Rome is deeply different, yet a trained ear could quite sort at least at sub-regional level the variants; as an example I studied at university with 4 others from Southern Italy which on paper should have spoken the same language (Neapolitan) yet I was quite sure which one was from the Adriatic coast, who from the middle of Appennines and who was actually from Naples.
Italy is a linguistically rich country, yet this cultural treasure doesn't get the attention it deserves (or even worse, it gets attention from those who should just keep their tentacles away)
I will say learning Standard Italian or heck the Standard of said Language is the way to go and other regional languages you learn them if you live in a specific region. Like if you move to Sicily you will probably pick up Sicilian for example. But because Standard Italian itself is a releatively recent language there's probably more differences between regional languages.
@@FlagAnthem I see, I seem to have misjudged the similarity amongst gallo-italic languages. I didnt mention venetian because I am aware venetian is a "nope" in terms of intelligibility 😂. But I have been exposed to Lombard (Im Swiss), a little bit of Genoese (through family) and Piemontese (coincidentally), and I understood all 3 fairly well just by speaking Catalan. So I guess those 3 in particular are most similar. Granted, I didn't mean to say they are identical, but as you have stated, like the Iberian languages (portuguese/galician, asturian, and spanish), or the occitano-romance languages (catalan, lengadocian, gascon, provenzal, auvernhon), or even the oïl languages (norman, french, gallo, tourangeois), I do imagine they are at least similar enough to, with a bit of effort, understand each other. Or are they really all that different?
@@alejandror.planas9802 oh yes. I had a friend from Bologna who was into HEMA to the point of reading rrnaissance essays on swordfighting in Catalan. His "trick" was: just think it is Lombard.
So yeah, I can see how you cracked northern languages "the other way"
When I stayed a couple of weeks in Italy, it was in Friuli Regione.. I only knew destra e sinestra, at the time. I knew some German and the shop keepers up north could talk a little. I stayed in Maiano (a very small town). The older folks spoke Furlan..everyone could speak standard Italian. TV even had Italian subtitles for programs from Rome...as the Roman dialect was not easy for them to understand. I also visited Genoa and Venice which had very interesting speaking.
Oh, Furlan is one of the most difficult and different ones. I live in Caserta and the Neapolitan language spoken in Naples and the one spoken in Caserta are quite different. I guess if I'd ever go there, I won't understand much.
Maybe you saw the FGV version of Rai, the national broadcaster, which guarantees to special broadcasts in local languages, as FGV is recognized as multi language area.
What year you've been there?
I speak a standard Italian to a basic level, but I want to learn Tuscan Dialect to more "match" what my grandfather would have spoken at home growing up.
I would say the main problem of learning those regional dialects, from the point of view of a foreigner being outside Italy, it is to find a lot of learning material, such as grammar, dictionary, conversion guides, etc. Of course today we may find several videos on youtube, but that would take a lot of time to search them (how to know if those are good material among the found one, if found something?) and demands a huge effort doing such searches
I just want to see a Metatron video entirely in Sicilian.
I, a Dane, have a holiday home in Liguria. My italian is very limited but I get by. In my village people say “salve” insted of “chaio”, so I say salve to. I i don¨t know if this regional or or just oldfashioned.
It is an informal way of saying ciao!
I'm from Liguria and we are usually very reserved, hope you're enjoying my beloved region :)
Even within regions there are so many varieties! I've heard Sicilians and Calabrians say "what do you want?" (che vuoi?) as either chi voi, chi buoi, chi vui, etc. And that's just within two adjacent regions. In some dialects the snarl or slurring of words can often remove meaning, like in voi/vuoi, not to mention the confusion when it comes to speaking formally: do you use lei; or voi? Vui, or vossia? The benefit of linguistic standardisation is that there is a *standard*, though it does make me sad to think dialects seem to be fading faster in Italy than they are among diasporic Italian communities.
I've been speaking Sicilian since childhood (Palermitano), we usually say "chi buoi?" and "vossia" I found is now considered very old fashioned and is rarely used. I use many old words that aren't used much anymore. I once referred to la cisterna as "a gebbia" which I believe has Arab roots and they looked at me as if I was from another century.
I do agree that the dialects are sadly fading. In Sicily, with each generation,more and more of the old words and phrases are being replaced by Italian
My grandmother is Ladin from a small village in the province of Belluno and speaks Ladin, Italian and German She moved to Austria in the 1950's to marry an Austrian man. My dad still understands ladin but doesn't really speak it and my siblings and I didn't grow up with any of that. He did teach us a bit of italian, and maybe a few ladin words, but that's it. We only spoke German at home. But this is really sad, because I love the way ladin sounds so much and like you said, which resources should I use for learning it and then, after having learnt it, what's the use?
witch kinds of ladin spoke your mother ? i can spoke in friulano ( ladino retico or ladino geltico ) as similar to ladino spoken in moena or better in val di fassa
The fact they are even called "dialects" instead of sister languages in many examples, is a reflection of current linguistic classification. If it's a language inside a country, it's called a dialect. For example, what we call "the Italian dialect" in my native region of southern Brazil is a dialect of Venetian, with some Portuguese mixed in (especially for the words that still didn't exist at the time). You can't understand an Italian if you speak Brazilian Venetian, and vice-versa.
Same with "Spanish", there is no "Spanish" language, Spain has a dozen languages and most of them are completely mutually unintelligible.
@@-haclong2366
I doubt it, since even Portuguese is 95% intelligible (at least in writing).
@@kekeke8988 - That reminds of a Portuguese friend in America who was born & raised in Portugal. By chance he came across some
Portuguese construction workers & when conversing with the boss he wanted to know who his workers are from since he couldn't understand them when talking & the boss said they are from Southern Portugal. Enough said about the Portuguese language.
I know it's been a while, but I cast my vote for a short video of Furlan. My Mom was from Venzone, but as an immigrant to the US, she wanted to make sure that I learned English. I never took the opportunity to learn Furlan from her while she was alive.
Thank you metatron to mention Sardinian. I am Sardinian but never learned how to speak the Sardinian language properly because we are not taught any of it in school. I think it is a shame that some people in Sardinia consider our language as awkward to speak because it's usually linked to rural lifestyle. Now that I'm learning Japanese in university I strangely feel the need to learn my regional language more than ever, even though it might be very difficult as Sardinian has also its own dialects or in some cases full on languages, for example Sardinian spoken in the north would be very hard to understand in the south. I'll try my best anyways and I hope many more people will get interested about regional languages in Italy as we need to cherish our local cultural diversity and way to speak.
I also am Sardinian and I do speak my mother tongue fluently, since I come from the most conservative part of the island (in terms of language), which is Barbagia. If you're interested, I'm offering lessons. I just started yesterday after a dude commented on a video I posted lol
Don't blame school, blame family. Sardinian and dialect are languages for close relations. It might be useful to study local languages at school, but only to understand the culture and learn the orthography. It should be the parents who teach you Sardinian, not the school, because this local language is really a 'family language', in the good sense of the term, and if you do not practise it at home, it is quite useless to study it at school, because there is the lack of literature and because Sardinian also has its own dialect that changes depending on the area. and some specific forms are spread between family uses. I can tell you by experience.
But I really hope that in some way italian local languages be studied and preserved at school. I hate the fact my nephews can't speak dialects, just because the stupidity of my brothers.
Sardinian is it a NATIONAL language, not regional
Sardinian is a romance language (with different variants like Campidanese, lugudorese ECT ) and it is recognized by UNESCO as a endangered language. As such it should be taught in Sardinian schools. For many years, expecially during the 50' and 60' we were taught to be ashamed of our language. No more
@@stefmel5897 you told it. The problem is people don’t speaking. Even Italian and geography (and geography isn’t!) should be learned at school, but local language officially recognised by UNESCO, should be preserved by social environment. Or do we study Italian cuisine or the art of building dry walls at school? For me, it’s fine
Raff, I would really enjoy a mini corse on the Sicilian language. I think it will help me in my future visits to the mother country. My grandpa immigrated from Sicily, San Pier Niceto, specifically. I’m glad I finally found your second channel, more of your great content to devour!
I'm Italian American & I visited visited Sicily three times. Being there I talked to a Sicilian & asked why no one speaks Sicilian. The Sicilian said only "old people speak Sicilian). But apparently the Sicilians do understand & can understand the Sicilian language but now they only speak the Italian national language.
WE WANT TO KNOW ABOUT SICILIAN!
My dad is a huge fan of AC Milan. He even named me Milan as a middle name. The idea of going to Milan, speaking Milanese, and introducing myself as Milan is too funny for me to choose any other dialect or standard Italian.
Oh gosh, that's actually funny. You should totally do that. When I was a kid, Ac Milan was my favourite team.
Actually in Milan very few people can speak Milanese, if not few words.
This is due to the strong migration from other parts of Italy.
I myself, who was born in Milan, but have Neapolitans parents, can understand Milanese, but do not speak it. As a matter of fact i can understand Neapolitan as well (and maybe even a little better than Milanese), but, again, I do not speak it.
When I was a child (and it was many years ago) just older people spoke Milanese and evenctually those few people became fewer and fewer. Of course if you grow up in Milan you're gonna take the local accent, but hardly you're gonna learn and speak Milanese dialect. Unlike (almost) any other place in Italy.
Hi, your father is great, I respect him 👍 I was born and live in Milan, here no one speaks dialect anymore except for a few rare exceptions.Forza Milan😜
A video on dialect vs. language would be interesting. My parents both grew up with Mennonite Low German as their first language, and I can understand it fairly well. Part of me thinks that it's just a dialect, but it really is its own language, somewhere between High German and Dutch.
once you said you've been to Friuli it made me think of Pordenone, great place. The only particular idiom I can recall from the area is "dio cane" except they don't really pronounce the e
Corsican and Sardinian have high intelligibility with Italian and are separate languages and sisters of Italian that can be used in Italy and understood well.
Even in France, Corsican and Sardinian have prestige as Romance languages outside of Europe.
Now of course, for those who don't have the chance to learn Sardinian and Corsican, follow the advice in the video, learn Italian and then the regional languages of Italy to avoid any problems.
Corsican is similar to Tuscan, so it's quite easy to understand for an Italian speaker; Sardinian it's different language.
@@ferruccioveglio8090 I didn't talk about every type of Sardinian, I talked about the unified Sardinian that already has the influence of Italian for intelligibility and communication purposes, this same type of Sardinian is intelligible with Corsican.
Your speech already comments on the traditional regional and isolated Sardinian, which is not close to either Corsican or Italian. I did not mention this modality because it is not related to other Romance languages, which is not culturally productive.
I'd talked about only Unified Sardinian in terms or communication to Corsican and Italian.
Goodbye 👋🫂.
My boyfriend is half Italian. The Sicilian kind. I want to learn Italian as well. Unfortunately, he only knows a little as his mom figured in America English would work better. I also have some Sicilian floating around (great grandma)
I would love a little mini course in Sicilian because my goal is to learn all regional dialects of Italy and then learn the standard
You ain't gonna reach that goal pal
you'd better look for another thing to achieve. Every dialect is very hard in it's own way, it doesn't have a standardized form as a language has, istead the dialect changes a bit as you move from an area to another every few kms (between Alps, you just need to cross 1 single mountain and you can find a completely different dialect on the other side). The language that is spoken in my area is not too different from Italian as I live quite near to tuscany, but it takes about 55 sounds to pronounce it correctly, and you can't get even 1 of those sounds wrong or, the few people still able to use the dialect, will immediatly notice you are not from Bologna and just switch to standard italian.
I love your dream, but you should give the whole life just to try to do that. Normally an italian can speak just two dialects, because dialect conditions the way Italian is spoken, and eventually, one of the two prevails in everyday speech. But italians can mimic very good others regional accents.
Fun fact: every variation of italian (in vowels, consonants sounds, double consonants, etc) has is opposite in another accent. For example: Sardinian people tent to double consonants even if singular, while Veneti people are very bad on pronouncing double consonants.
So, I became interested in Neapolitan because my great great grandparents came from Potenza. Yes, I know Potenza in Basilicata, but as far as I understand, Lucano is a dialect or variety of the Nnapulitano , and since there are already some video content of Neapolitan, I decided to go for that one.
I learn standard Italian, I have distant Italian origin apparently from Sardinia.I like the jackal canal they re super funny and they speak a mixture of italien and napolitan. Sicilian language with his bunch of influence could be interesting because there are many people from Sicily. If I speak Italian they are happy and if I put some Sicilian words that probably make me more friendly for them.
being corsican sicilian i can speak corsican pretty well and i actually learned it before italian when my girlfriend who his from Naples can understand it quite well since she's a fluent speaker of italian but i cannot understand napolitan
Well oddly enough italian is much more similar to corsican than to neapolitan because they both derive from tuscan
Right on. I lived in the north learned basic Italian but was close to a family and some small towns, which I didn't realize how much was regional language until going to Rome for a bit.
I'm wondering if in Italy you have the same sort of situation as we have here with our Dutch dialect (West-Flanders region). Here the dialect can change abruptly in the course of 10-15 km. The basics are the same, but vocabulary, pronounciation and idioms can vary wildly. One time when I was a lot younger, I heard a song in a more southern version of our dialect and I though it was someone not from the region doing a very poor imitation..
some regional languages can get really decentralized, not mentioning some alpine communities when some languages actually survives in sparse villages only.
Much more different. The Italian Peninsula didn't have a unified Language until the mid 19th century and even then it's not entirely unified with many Italians having more attachment to their region over the country as a whole.
@@Epsilonsama yes it did. From Alps to sicily administation and culture was thaught and written in Italian with a fair diglossia level among people.
The first Italian full dictionary is from early 1600s
Why people still think Italian sort of popped up from nothing after 1861?
@@FlagAnthem I doubt that dictionary was titled "the Italian full dictionary"
It must've specified it's Tuscan, of that it's a Standard, because back then that's what it was. A refined, manufactured Tuscan with no native speakers. And over time it just got more and more artificial in many ways.
Did you know that by the 7th century no one ever said "lingua"? Latin was still spoken, mind you, but native Latin speakers read that as lengua. And in Italy too it was lengua, straight from Late Latin. Standard Italian sort of reversed it to seem similar to Classical Latin.
This language only gained traction out of the very well educated and eventually pushed all over Italy, as you said, since the 1860s.
@@FlagAnthem Btw I'm not criticizing, a national language is useful and such "regressions" to classical Latin are also seen in Spanish, for example. For instance, every word in Spanish where you see a CT together it's likely one of those. Or the GN, which in Late Latin should've started turning into something that sounds like Italian in some Spanish words it returned to a separate G+N. Signo, meaning sign, is one of those. It should've been Siño but it got changed.
Spanish doesn't have as many though because it was too focused on purging Arabic loanwords lmao.
Id love to learn Sicilian one day, but I'll be sure to learn Italian first
I thought the time I was near Bari, when I heard the unclenof my friend speaking Barese dialect 😂 As a romagnolo it seemed a mix of arabic and swiss-german to me
Burdél, all you need is some binge watch of Cozzalo Heidi grandpa funny YT videos
I had no idea this was so complex. Great video.
Italy is so linguistically rich that even dialects have dialects
A perfect statement of the facts. Here in Lombardy where I live, there is no standard regional language, but rather each municipality (comune) has its own dialect. Milanese dialect is the best documented, but it differs a lot from the Eastern Lombard Dialects of Bergamo, Brescia and Crema. Bergamasque is difficult to understand, so you have a situation like Spanish and Portuguese. The Portuguese (Bergamasque) understand the Spanish (Milanese), but not vice versa. For a sample of Bergamasque, see the film "Albero degli zoccoli" with subtitles in Italian. :-) The strongest regional language in Northern Italy is Veneto (Venice, Padua, Verona, etc.) and they are trying to develop a standard language. The regional language of Piedmont is well documented with a grammar and dictionary, but not accepted by everyone outside of Turin. A complicated situation.
Yeah I didn't realise how different they are my dad always told me the Comascan dialect had a very distinct word for flower but the Google translate Lombard's word was identical to Italian which dialect is it even based on
@@Joseph-pz5bo To say the truth, even within the province of Como, as in all the other Lombard provinces, the dialect varies, to a greater or lesser extent, from parish to parish. // The city has its own dialect, while the Lake has another called "laghee" and the part toward Milan (La Brianza) another. But, generally speaking, Comasco is similar to Milanese on the South and Mendrisiotto (Ticino, Switzerland) on the North. // Here is a sample of Comasco with the word flower: Åpril ål fa i FIUR, magg i'a culura. Aprile fa i fiori, maggio li colora. (April produces the flowers and May colors them.) The word "fiur" vs. IT "fiore" is the most common I think, unless you are referring to a specific flower. // Lecco used to be part of Como province and the dialect changes rapidly Between Lecco and Pontida, where it is fully Bergamasque, For example, five in Como or Lecco is "cinch" pronounced "chink". In different Bergamasque dialects, it can be "sinch", "sich", or "hic" pron. "sink", "sick" or "hick". Five flowers could be: Como. "cinch fiur", Bergamo: "hic fiur", all rather different from Italian "cinque fiori". ;-)
My favorite words in an Italian dialect are nicu and nicùzzu because they are very similar to the Romanian micu(l) and micuțu(l) (I put the l's in parentheses because many don't pronounce the final l's). Etymologycally they both come the the Greek "mikkos"
Interesting how Sardinian and Romanian still have lot of words ending in -u, which doesn't quite happen in Italian
@@FlagAnthem nicu/nicuzzu isn’t Sardinian, it’s Sicilian. Source: I’m half Sardinian half Sicilian 😂
@@silviamilamaslol
@@FlagAnthemnicu/nicuzzu is not Sardinian. It's sicilian and It means small. In sicilian words end in -u instead of -o . Marco=Marcu Oro=Oru Metto=Mettu
@@silviamilamasHo risposto e solo dopo ho visto il tuo commento 😅😂
Italian dialects are great fun! I especially love dialectal proverbs. One of my favorites is:
"Anch quésta l'è fatta dess quél ch' cavò i uc' a so muier" (bolognese)
"That too is done, said the one who gouged out his wife's eyes"
(It is said in reference to an action completed with satisfaction)
It's more a wellerism than a real proverb but it always makes me laugh!
thank you very much Metatron! it would be really great if you do a video or a small course about Sicilian
In Sicilia parlano molti dialetti
1:40 -- That would be a great video.
As long as you know what Minchia means it doesn't matter which variety of Italian you chose to learn.
Da bôn! Un forester al g'ha da imparà l'italiàn prima da druá una lëingua regiunàl. Imparä un dialëtt l'è sa mò dificil per nüätar, figürat par un inglès o un tudësc.
Spero di averlo scritto bene, chiedo scusa a mio nonno se delle volte ho sbagliato qualcosa 🤣. (Delle volte è un pieno dialettismo tra l'altro)
Question from a non-Italian speaker: how different are Swiss Italian from 'main' Italian ?
Almost the same, they use some different vocabulary but there is 0 trouble communicating
Its basically the same, but even in italian switzerland they have a "dialect", wich is actually a variety of lombard. Italian was sort of taught to a lot of people, in the same way that french was not really spoken in french switzerland, because the majority of the population spoke franco-provençal (aka arpitan, sometimes called patois), wich is not french
@@dulaman9791 Interesting. Thanks 🙂
My mother has learned standard Italian, but her teacher was from Piemonte region, and south of about Rome, she was having difficulties communicating with the locals
Great Page! Im a big fan of linguistic and Eptymology in general. I dont have the aptitude and time for one second language. But how they morph and adapt interest me.
My mum's family is Sardinian. When we moved to Sardinia I could barely understand elderly people there since they spoke regional Sardinian dialects. I got told it is more of a combination of Arabic, Latin and Spanish than Italian. In fact, my mum had no trouble speaking to and understanding people when she visited Spain because her knowledge of Sardinian helped her out a lot. That said I also had trouble understanding anyone in Piemonte speaking their own dialect there. It's quite interesting to see how different it can be!
The piemontese languages have been heavily influenced by occitan, whilst the Sardiniana have been influenced more by Latin than anything else, thus you can see how you're not going to understand one while only knowing the other
Bro il sardo non ha niente dell'arabo💀💀💀
Il sardo non ha origini arabe, è la lingua romanza piu vicina al latino, con influenze protosarde, spagnole, catalane e italiane
@@diegone080 non è possibile dire quale lingua sia più vicina al latino, poiché le lingue non funzionano proprio così (per quanto ne so)
Ha sicuramente mantenuto, però, un vocabolario più vicino al latino di altre lingue
@@diegone080 da tempo gira sui social una sorta di manifesto qualunquista, dove si vorrebbe qualificare il sardo come un fantasioso miscuglio, comprendente l’arabo che ovviamente non c’entra nulla, niente di strano che qualcuno ci creda e poi lo spieghi anche ad altri. Anche io sono sarda, dalle mie parti si parla il campidanese, ho fortissimi problemi a capire chi parla davvero in sardo, in genere gli anziani.
I can remember a few words in Romagnol from my friend in Cesena. My favorite is the Romagnol word for thunderstorm: Scarvaz! (Great word! I use it all the time. Friends think I'm nuts). I noticed that Romagnol tends to eliminate ending and beginning vowels in some words: Ospedale (hospital) becomes spedal, il cane (the dog) could be le can, e can, le ca, e ca or the French le chien. Every town and village would have their own variety.
I love Italy's diversity. Such a beauty of a country every region has its own customs, values, history, cuisine along with its own language. Centre of Europe.
Your English is amazing! I learnt to speak Italian in Naples many years ago but my Italian is nowhere near as good as your English. I wish it was!
the strings on your jacket are uneven it bothers me lol
Many are dieing out. The oldest generation is fluent in the village language but people 40 and below have moved and are familiar but is less and less among family members.
If it's possible, please do some videos on the Sicilian language.
Metaboy, do you think Tuscan should have been the dominant Latin child-language out of it and all of it's siblings?
Any other thoughts on this, like, for example, would there be a runner up if you think the Tuscan dialect is the best choice?
Studied Standard Italian. Then met my Northern Tuscan husband who speaks a version of Emilian with all his family. That took me 17 years to understand😂 Now obsessed with Napoletano after watching My Brilliant Friend and Gomorrah. This was the dialect I heard growing up in Queens NY.
Thank you for your suggestion to learn Italian standard. I would be interested in a mini-course in Sicilian but I would like you to explore, as you see fit, the many versions of Sicilian and perhaps reasons why certain pronunciations developed in different regions of the island. West vs east, coastal vs interior, etc....
Sicilian course, yes please!
Common rules to speak roman dialect
1 if you see a double R, pronounce only one
2 say “Ao” and “Daje” more often than you breathe
3 use a rude tone, even if you’re talking about how cute your puppy is
4 (optional) choose a Roman Football team and be angry, violent and stupid about it
Congrats, you can speak roman dialect now.
Coming from English and learning Italian in middle age it is extremely difficult. My grandfather spoke standard Italian, my great grandfather Neapolitan but later also standard Italian as I remember my great grandfather and grandpa talking in Italian in the 80s. I recently became a dual citizen and have been studying Italian for the past several years largely teaching myself. Im at the stage where I need live classes to get better at using it with natives at a grown up pace. When I was in Italy I understood it if it was spoken slowly but as soon as they started conjugating quickly and talking like - well an adult instead of someone in an easy reader book it got rough real quick. I can order drinks, ask for directions, etc. funny enough no matter how many times I asked for coffee to go they all tried to resist giving me a to go cup. They’d give it to me but they all had a horrified look on their face 😂
the italian literary language is actualy one of the toscan dialects and not the one from Rome right ?
Right