La Bella Lingua, Why don't we speak it?

The fact is that only about 5% of Italian/Americans speak Italian. Then again you have to define Italian. I like to use the term "Standard Italian". For example, did my parents speak Standard Italian? Certainly not to each other. They spoke a form of Neapolitan, a language that was not understood out of that area. Now their friends the Roses, were Sicilian and that's what they spoke, a language barely understood by the Neapolitans and certainly not understood by the Northern Italians. With the Roses they spoke English.

So what were my parents and others like them to do? Should they have taught us their language, a language that was certainly useful in the house or with other folks from their region or should they have taught us Standard Italian, a language that they barely knew? They could have sent us to Italian language school, however any such school would teach only Standard Italian. That would have helped us with the wider educated Italian world, but not in our communications with them. In fact, I think it would have been an embarrassment to them, to have their children speak the language of the educated class while they spoke the local dialect indicating their lack of education.

To be sure, they did know some Standard Italian, after all they did have three years of compulsory education and they did know how to read and write in Standard Italian. Dialects are usually not written nor do they have rules, Standard Italian does.* I remember my father speaking to his cousin who was a professor of Italian at Princeton University on the phone. This cousin, Arturo Mancini, only spoke Standard Italian, so my father had to respond in kind. He spoke, but it was halting and clearly not his mother tongue.

This sort of explains why only 5% of Italian/Americans speak the Standard Italian language. In Italy today, according to the national statistics bureau, 55% of Italians still use dialect some or most of the time when they are with family or friends.** When my parents came to the United States the users of dialect must have been near 90%. Thank god for Italian television, as now almost everyone on TV speaks standard Italian. In fact, everyone that graduates from High School in Italy speaks Standard Italian. If a person in Italy does not speak Standard Italian you know he or she is uneducated.

So how did Italy get into this language conundrum? Think of the Italian peninsula 2500 years ago. There were a bunch of Italic tribes all speaking their own languages. For sure some of these were similar but the further apart the tribes were the less alike were their languages. Tribes in Sicily spoke very differently from tribes in northern Italy. However, around 300 or 200 BCA, one of these tribes became dominant over the others; the Romans who spoke Latin. As their influence evolved so did their language. They developed the Roman alphabet, the same one we use today.

Since they conquered and ruled the entire Italian peninsula and Sicily, the official language was Latin. That does not mean that the people on the street spoke Latin, but that all the official offices spoke in Latin and all official documents were in Latin. We know that the Catholic Masses were celebrated in Latin up until the early 1960‘s. Throughout the years the language of the people became infused with Latin words or the local languages became Latinized, however they differed according to the region of the country you lived in.

This sort of mishmash went on for many years after the Roman Empire ended. The populace spoke their dialect and the official documents were written in Latin or whatever language one of the many conquerors chose to use in whatever region they controlled.

In the 14th century there was a movement on the Italian peninsula and Sicily to standardize a language other than Latin that could be used as the “official” Italian language. During this period there were about 13 major dialects in Italy, two of the most dominant were the Tuscan and Sicilian.

It was during this period that Dante Alighieri, a Tuscan from Florence, began writing in his local dialect. What he did was to use the Roman alphabet sounds and write his Tuscan dialect according these sounds. This is why Standard Italian is a phonetic language. There is no such thing as spelling in Italian. Words are written exactly how they are sounded. For example, take my surname FUMO. Fu is pronounced as in Fu-Man -Chu--and Mo as in “Mo Money”.

This guy was a prolific writer. As we all know he wrote the “Divine Comedy”. All his writings, in his Tuscan dialect, formed the basis for the Standard Italian language of today. Also in the running as Standard Italian was the Sicilian dialect. During this period it was a well developed language with written poetry and stories. If, by chance of geography, Dante had been born in Sicily, Standard Italian could be Sicilian.

The Tuscan dialect is Standard Italian. If a person is speaking in the Sicilian dialect, he or she is not speaking “bad Italian”, they are speaking another language. If a person cannot speak Standard Italian it means that they are not formally educated. Mussolini, for whatever his faults were, made sure that all schools taught Standard Italian, the Tuscan dialect.

So if you have to learn Italian, make sure it is Standard Italian, that way you can converse with most of the populace on the peninsula and on the islands.

Caio Guaglioni (Napolitano)
Caio Ragazzi (Standard Italian)
Later Homies (Homeboy English)
Goodbye Boys and Girls (Standard English)



* Sicilian is certainly one of the exceptions
** “La Bella Lingua---Dianne Hales”