“The presence of dialects is a distinctive feature of our cultural history”. Michele Magno’s Bloc Notes
According to Istat, in 2015 almost 46 per cent of the population spoke in Italian with family members, over 32 both in Italian and in dialect, about 14 only in dialect (a percentage which however doubled in over 75). Although the use of the dialect has declined in the last twenty years, these data confirm what Dante already intuited in “De vulgari eloquentia”: there is no Romance language country (derived from Latin) in which, alongside the chosen dialect as a national language, so many regional or local languages coexist.
In fact, the late Tullio De Mauro wrote the presence of dialects and a distinctive trait of our cultural history (“Linguistic history of Italy from Unity to today”, Laterza, 2017). Well, the harshness of the contrasts between those who see dialects as a weed to be thrown away and those who dream of them as an uncontaminated source of creativity, cannot be understood without going back to the historical-linguistic reasons for their existence. I try to name a few.
Let’s start by remembering that dialects are not variants of Italian. If we want to resort to the image of the genealogical tree, the Italian dialects and Italian are as many branches of the common Latin trunk, equal to the Castilian or Portuguese or Aragonese in the Iberian peninsula; or in the Occitan or French of our French cousins. Whoever speaks a dialect, therefore, is not crippling Italian, but is speaking a different neo-Latin language. In their diversity, novel idioms are grouped into two large groups: Western and Eastern. Their border does not follow the borders between states. It cuts Italy in two: and the so-called La Spezia-Rimini line.
This line is a very ancient historical and ethno-geographic border: in the middle of the first millennium BC it separates Europe and Gallic Italy from Europe and from Etruscan, Osco-Umbrian, Illyrian and Greek Italy; later I separated hegemonized Italy from the Roman republic, south of the Rubicon, from the Po, Gallic and Venetian Italy. Later, at the time of Diocletian and then of the nascent Church, I separated Italy centered on Mediolanum and the transalpine dioceses from Italy centered on Rome and open to the Mediterranean world.
Secondly, it is worth recalling the reasons for the assumption of Florentine as a national language. De Mauro indicates four: 1) because, compared to other dialects such as Neapolitan and Lombard, it was much closer to classical Latin forms, and therefore seemed more familiar to the late medieval and Renaissance cultured class accustomed to reading and writing in Latin ; 2) for the great literary prestige conferred on him by Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch; 3) for the widespread promotion work carried out by the powerful Tuscan financial network; 4) by the will of the city lords and the most dynamic intellectual circles of the Renaissance to give Italy, politically divided but lived as a unitary reality in its own way, a national language comparable to that of the European states of the time.
However, despite these significant cultural and political motivations, Italian did not have those unifying impulses of religious origin which, since the sixteenth century, in today’s German-speaking countries led the large masses to the habit of reading and writing. Thus, the language of the Saxon chancellery, used by Luther to translate the Bible, really became – just its name (“deutsch”, in medieval Latin “teotiscus”, meant “popular”) – the language of a whole people, even though politically divided.
On the contrary, in the conditions in which our country lived before and after 1861, the Italian clashed with large forces hostile to its territorial diffusion. He knew the multiplicity of capital cities, each (with the exception of papal Rome) with municipal oligarchies. You suffer from the lack of a modern bourgeoisie and unitary administrative structures, as you suffer from the fragmentation of social and economic reality. In such conditions, it lived, outside of Florence, Siena and Rome (linguistically Tuscanized from the sixteenth century, except in the lowest – and outcast – plebeian strata), as a mere prerogative of writers and drafters of official documents. In everyday life, even on public occasions, all social classes in all regions continued to speak the native dialects.
And in this historical-linguistic context, marked by so many fractures and differences, the root of another singular phenomenon. In Europe, Italy is by far the richest country in native alloglot idioms, i.e. not imported by recent waves of immigrants: Occitan, Franco-Provençal, French, German del Rosa, Belluno and Bolzano, Veronese and Vicentino, Slovenian , Ladin from Bolzano and Trento and Friulian, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Neo-Greek from Calabria and Puglia, Sardinian Logudorese and Campidanese, Catalan, have coexisted since the Middle Ages with the northern and central-southern Italian dialects. A culpably misunderstood wealth, De Mauro complains rightly.
Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did the habit of speaking Italian begin to acquire some consistency among the bourgeois classes of the major cities. And it was only in the 1950s and 1960s that the economic and demographic boom, with the consequent urbanization of vast agricultural masses, imposed the need for a common language. Compulsory school and television will do the rest. A rest that is news, but a chronicle still full of shadows.
According to the Pisa tests (acronym for “Program for International Student Assessment”) of the OECD, the illiteracy rate of our young people is disheartening, it is much better for adults. It is also the fault of the dialects and their vitality
According to De Mauro, this is not the case. The educational ideas of Manzonians such as Luigi Morandi, Francesco De Sanctis, Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, to name a few, and that is to teach Italian not against dialects, but starting from dialects, have found a feeble listening to us. The truth is that dialects are neither virginal realities alternatives to the elite culture (as some populists claim); much less corruption of Italian, to be rejected and in any case to be ignored. Instead, “they are voices that cannot be suppressed in the secular chorus that makes the historical identity of Italian culture” [De Mauro].
