Accents and dialects
Accents and dialects
Italian schools do their best to teach young Italians how to write and speak correct Italian, but the real language is learnt in the family, in the street and at work.
No matter how many grammar exercises we do to learn how to speak perfect Italian, if our relatives, friends and the members of the community we live in speak a dialect with a strong local accent, it will invariably determine our speech style as adults. I have been learning Italian for years, and effectivly grew up tri-lingual as at home my parents spoke in a Puglian dialect that is incomprehensible to my friends who speak a broad Tuscan dialect that contains many words and phrases that someone from the neighbouring Emilia Romagna could not understand, while at school I grappled with modern Italian literature.
Growing up in Tuscany, I was taught, with no small amount of pride, that the Tuscan dialect was the antecedent of the language that is today known as Italian. But when working for Italian TV I was told that my Tuscan accent was no good for national TV. In fact the Italian “received pronunciation” has become that of Milan, where most of the Italian TV studios are based. There are many linguists that argue that the nationalisation of Italian has only been made possible with national TV.
Within the 20 regions in Italy there are currently 18 main dialects that are currently spoken. But in reality there are hundreds, with dialects varying significantly from town to town, let alone between the regions. Each dialect is a language unto itself, with accents that reflect past civilisations (for example the Tuscan aspirated c that transforms coca cola into “hoha hola” is a living relic of the Etruscan language), vocabulary that brought by a variety of invading cultures. Pugliese dialect is peppered with French and Greek words and Sicilian dialects have words borrowed from Arabic.
This poses difficulties not only for foreigners with perfect text book Italian but also for us Italians. We all understand italian but not all of us speak it, and when my father starts waxing lyric in his mother tongue, I see my Tuscan brother-in-law looking as blank as my foreign friends.