I should have made this comment some time ago, but it's better late than never! I make a pretty glaring mistake in this video: I try to define a difference between 'language' and 'dialect' at around 5:20. What I want the people watching this video to understand is that the difference between what we consider languages or dialects in common speech is purely political. There is absolutely no concrete line that exists which can help differentiate between languages and dialects. Things like mutual intelligibility don't matter whatsoever. The reason that in Croatia they speak 'Croatian' and in Serbia they speak 'Serbian' is the same reason why in Italy we say that someone who speaks Neapolitan and someone who speaks Venetian both speak dialects of 'Italian'; this reason is politics. I still believe the video as a whole holds a good message and is educational, and for those reasons I will leave it up. Still, I wanted to inform the viewer of my mistake so that hopefully they don't make the same mistake themselves. Thank you for watching.
That's true, it has a political sense, but actually there are some other languages recognised in italy in addiction to those in the map at 6:36. Take a look here! it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_mochena
true story. in fact, there was a programme in the 1950s called "non è mai troppo tardi" (it's never too late) that taught illiterate people to read, write and speak proper italian. and it was proper italian indeed, with the correct, accent-less pronunciation and grammar nazi attention to rules. ruclips.net/video/eb-Sv6OILqU/видео.html it had an enormous success. TV unified a lot of things and those bemoaning the decline of dialect should pay attention to other, infinitely more negative impacts it had to the society as a whole.
@@SimonMas Have you even watched the video? The languages Oscopo is talking about are not dialects of standard Italian. They're sister languages. Standard Italian isn't even a spoken language. It's a standardized form of 12th century Tuscan. Also, wiping out other languages and cultures in the name of efficiency is not only unethical, it's a huge loss for science, anthropology, and linguistics. It's basically the same thing white people did to the natives in America. Ban their language, destroy all traces of their culture, and if they don't cooperate, kill them. If they didn't do that, it would've negatively impacted the whites' society because then they wouldn't have been able to use the natives as free labor.
I studied Italian so that I could speak to my Italian Grandmother. Once I became fluent I was shocked that she was struggling to speak with me. I then found out that she didnt speak Italian. She spoke Napulitano. She learned Italian in school like I did, but it wasnt her native tongue.
@Roberto Biagio Randazzo I’m trying to find from any Italians if in their area there is a movement at least to preserve a local language, if not to make it official. Are there any for the Lombard language? Do the locals care or not?
When someone speaks Neapolitan in Italian movies or TV series (such as Gomorra) there are usually subtitles in Italian, otherwise nobody outside Neaples would understand...
@@tommasopandolfi1750 mah non so onestamente fino a che punto. Per farti un esempio: da me "che cosa?" si dice "cik jaj?". Nei paesi limitrofi si dice "c ghé?" "ce da?" "ciò bà?" "ce de?" "ci je?". Questa cosa nelle altre lingue non l'ho mai vista se non nelle nazioni arabe
@bunnylarese2161 This is just factually incorrect. I can tell you lack respect for other cultures. Italian culture is beautiful and rich, so naturally many people enjoy learning or indulging in it. Immigrants from Italy also brought things like pizza to New York which lead to its globalisation. (Although part of why Italian food is so popular is because pasta/pizza is relatively easy to make and easy to incorporate different things. Example, in Korea they have all sorts of different toppings on pizza.) However liking a culture doesn’t make you obsessed with it, and certainly doesn’t make you want to be that nationality. Don’t get a big head or a big ego, there’s plenty of nasty things about Italian history as well as beautiful. No one world culture is perfect, just as none is better than another. And at the end of the day we are all human. How about a little respect?
I lved in Italy for 14 years. When I got there, I knew a handful of Italian words: pizza, lasagna, ciao, and that was about it. I was in the area near Napoli, fell in love and stayed. I primarily learned Italian, but I couldn't help but be intrigued by the lical language, Neapolitan. It is beautiful and full of feeling as well as unique ways of expressing things. I gradually became fairly proficient in both. When I traveled to different parts of Italy, some people, noticing my accent treated me as if there were something wrong with me. I later lived in the Marche, and my children had more of a local accent, as we lived in Fano, province of Pesaro Urbino. I kind of drifted between dialects, depending on who I was speaking with. After all, I was living there, not just a tourist, and the degree of complexity was that of native speech. People would often ask where I was from. I rold them I was American. Some folks referred to me as " that American with the Neapolitan accent." It was pretty funny. I learned to speak Italian without a particular accent and got a stranger reaction. They acted as if they were speaking with someone who came out of a TV. Also funny. Then I would speak the local Fanese dialect and, bingo, I was one of them.
Italian here, from the very north. All is very accurate, but it's even more complicated than that: each language spoken in a region is divided in even smaller dialect, and each of them with significant differences. Sometimes we even have different words for the same concept within a 50km radius. Some regions are holding on to their languages more than others, but due to internal migration within Italy, there are a lot of children that does not speak the regional language of their own parents because is not used where the family actually lives.
True, I am from Brescia province, basso garda Bresciano, we have some linguistics influence from Venetian, I have friends from val Trompia and they do not pronounce the S sound, they replace it with an H. And some words are different from town to town.
West Turin guy here, other than piedmuntese we also have another dialect, more similar to French compared with our dialect. It is an older dialect and very few people know it here. It's called "patois", here in Chisone valley I know only a bunch of people that can speak it. I cant.
In Aosta Valley the “official” dialect is the patois. And EVERY village have some difference in their patois. But this dialect is dying because the new generations doesn’t want to apprend it (including myself)
@@x_pole_i1184 Probably because it's useless outside of that specific place where it's spoken unfortunately, which means nobody has much desire to make sure it gets passed on.
The sad thing is, this has been going on all over Europe. Dutch, French, German, Spanish, all of these have been taking the place and seat of a whole cast of small and beautiful languages now considered nothing but "dialects". This video, and Italy as a whole, are a beautiful case study on this injustice.
Sadly true, we should study these languages to keep them alive, curiously many people (like me) don't like to say Spanish but Castilian, which is at least a very small step in the right direction...
I'm from Rome and I have friends all over Italy: communication isn't impossible since of course we all learnt the same italian in school, but I do sometimes blurt out words from my own dialect and the others stare at me confused. I have a hard time knowing what words are italian and what words are roman because i speak roman with my friends and family and so sometimes i'm like "yo in Naples do you guys say *word*?" it's so fascinating that we are a single country with so much language diversity.
I was married to a Roman for 5 years and although 40 years have passed since our divorce I retain an affection for canzone romano, Trilussa and er Sor Capanna
I had to move to Rome a few years ago and I know this feeling. As the Roman dialect is, overall, pretty similar to Italian, if you don't run into some words that are completely different from standard Italian, you get used to the grammar quirks quite easily. It's also a really popular in mainstream culture, as Roman and Neapolitan are usually the only dialects widely used on tv or in music, so usually every Italian has had at least a grasp of them. But when I tried to explain to a foreign friend that in Rome they say, for example "er" instead of "il", cut verbs and articles and prepositions, she was kind of terrified. It also happens to me to say a word or an expression that would be normal in the regional variety of Italian I would speak in my hometown and see people around me really confused. The most obvious one is placing articles before female first names, it really drives people crazy
I'm Italian, from Bari (South East), and I can tell you: it's hard to understand each other when people in different towns (even only around Bari) speak their own dialect. It happens in some contexts. Like most old people struggle to speak proper italian because of their strong accent, sometimes they try to translate literally some words or concepts from dialect to Italian and it's kinda funny. :D
Anch'io sono di Bari, della frazione di Palese-Santo Spirito. A casa abbiamo sempre parlato italiano, ma conosco anche il dialetto, ma solo perché l'ho imparato per conto mio; infatti la famiglia di mia madre non ha mai parlato dialetto, mentre quella di mio padre sì. Peccato che mio padre non sia di Bari, ma di Giovinazzo, quindi mi sono ritrovato a parlare giovinazzese a Bari... un casino assurdo per capirsi. Ovviamente i miei compaesani percepivano il giovinazzese della mia parlata, ma per via della zona in cui ho vissuto ho integrato nel mio vocabolario termini e suoni del barese estranei al giovinazzese, quindi quando andavo a Giovinazzo i locali percepivano il barese. Poi mi sono trasferito a Roma. I romani sentono il barese e i miei parenti ora sentono il romano... non so più neanche io cosa sono.
i'm venetian, and i remember being a kid and wondering what was the language my parents spoke with my uncles, aunts and grandparents because they rarely spoke italian to each other (that hasn't changed, even now) and i remember calling it "adult language". As i grew up i knew a few words but didnt really speak it until i met some new friends in middle school who often spoke it semi-ironically because it sounds really funny when you scream it like an angry farmer so i started doing the same. Today i feel like i'm not speaking it as much but this video made me realize how important it is so im gonna start using more often
@@alexandro112 è proprio questa l'immagine che viene data dalla propaganda italiana anti identitaria al "dialetto". Anche se sono lingue regionali di tutto rispetto che derivano dal latino. In Veneto ad esempio si è sempre parlato Veneto non italiano, si parlava Veneto anche negli ex territori veneti di Istria Dalmazia e Grecia e lo si parla ancora al giorno d'oggi (sempre meno però). In Veneto sono scritte opere letterarie. Col fascismo e il suo lavaggio del cervello però sono state tutte relegate a lingue obbrobri (e lo sono tuttora). I giovani non le parlano più quindi sono destinate ad estinguersi.
I live in the Dolomites and I speak Ladin at home. This language is very different in its dialects depending on the valley where is spoken, some are very difficult because more archaic than other. It is fun that everyone in Italy (except in my area) can’t recognize at all my accent, it is one of the most neuter of all language of Italy, for example a Venetian or a Neapolitan can be recognized very easily.
Uguale andavo a scuola in Val di Fassa e c’era la materia di Ladino. Peccato che non l’ho imparato. Ma concordo l’accento, anche nel mio caso nessuno lo azzecca mai indipendentemente da dove vengono😂
Dalla mia esperienza fino a questo momento il Ladino è quella lingua che se non ascolti sembra italiano, se ascolti ti rendi conto che non capisci una parola
I'm Ladin too (from Cortina) and you are right, we have almost no accent. Everybody finds that I'm from the north of Italy, but nobody can find exactly where
Il problema non è che è neutro,bensì che sono pochi i fruitori di questa lingua in confronto ai veneti ed in particolare ai napoletani,siciliani,romani ecc; cosicché l'accento ladino è quasi sconosciuto al resto degli italiani.
My father is Italian. When he came to Australia as a boy in the sixties, his teachers thought he was dumb and couldn't speak. It wasn't until they heard him speak Italian in the yard that they approached the local Convent to work as translators. The nun, on her first day, quit because she couldn't understand a word my father was saying - he was speaking Abruzzese, and the nuns had never learnt it. This year I travelled to Italy to scatter my Nonna's ashes over the Apenines. I speak limited Italian, but I can get by outside of cities. It was incredible to hear my father's native tongue and how distinct the difference is between standardised Italian and Neapolitan dialects. Negations and prepositions all sounded slightly different, which was the way I spoke them as a child but was told to forget when learning formally. It felt like a bit of my Nonna survives in her language, which is incredibly heart warming.
Hi there, i'm italian from Verona (Veneto)! Thank you for this video, i always said that dialects in Italy are more similar to languages than variation from italian. My family and the place i live in still have the important tradition of using venetian more than italian, even because the elders were never taught italian in the first place since it's a very rural zone more focused on agriculture than progress. Just a note: Venetian is the language yes, but instead of saying "central venetian" we use the cities in the region to differentiate the variations. So i use veronese, a person from Venice will use veneziano and so on. Fun fact: in my region the more towards the mountains you go the less italian you'll hear lol.
that's why is a dialect it doesn't exist a standard version of it and every place speaks in a different way...the funny thing about Italy that you're convinced that you're very different when Italy is one of the few countries in the world that are really homogeneous
Woowowo, strong statement bro, on the coast we say the same about more inland areas. The more you go towards the mountains and Lombardia, the more Italian you are. That said, Venetians have a very much strong identity, some of my teachers used to teach in Venetian rather than Italian at school, and I'm 21. It's still very much alive even in the young population, which is rad nice
As an Italian I can tell you this is so well written and I can confirm every single word. The fact that language isn't taken care of much in this world is truly a shame, especially since it has been proven that preventing language death improves people's lives. I speak one of the many dialects of Sicilian, and I cannot tell you how many times I have dreamt of holding a school book in Sicilian in my hand, or hearing the news in my native language. Things need to change quickly, but honestly I'm not that optimistic. I'm barely not a kid and speak Italian 90% of the time, if the government don't do anything, my kids won't speak my language. Every little bit helps, even from across the pond, so thank you for this video!!
"it has been proven that preventing language death improves people's lives." - what would such proof look like? I can't get past what a hassle it must be to have so many languages in such a small area. "I'll be driving 200 miles south today. Good thing I spent three years in university studying their language!"
@@muskyoxes The goal of language is to communicate, not to accomodate learners. Therefore, there IS proof, the improvement just doesn't include people who are not from the area. And why would it? Also, I don't want to get into too much detail or too argumentative, but language is never just language. It's culture, identity, sometimes (unfortunately) politics, which means that some people feel like their local language was taken away from them through the means of shame and in the name of a nation that existed just in the Italian elite's mind. So keeping it alive sends the message that people who know it can speak it and not be ashamed of it. Now, I wouldn't say I'm not Italian, I'm just as Italian as I am Sicilian, and the experiences that unify Italians have existed for centuries now (language included). But why should I consider Sicilian, which I hold in my heart as dearly as Italian (like many people), a "hassle", just for the sake of learners? I just don't think that's fair. Also, it's only a "hassle" because it wasn't standardised, it's not taught in schools, the use in media is highly stigmatised, so there are no resources for learners. If it was promoted, used in administration, etc., then maybe people who move to Sicily will have a chance to learn it as much as families who move to Finland, for example, and their children have to learn at least some Swedish (because it's an official langaguage there). And there are many other examples of countries who do this, so why should Italy be different in this regard? Remember that "Italian" is just a label. People might not be "just" Italians. And to answer your question: what would such proof look like? Just look up on Google Scholar "does language revitalization improve health".
@@amormir8280 there are tens of thousands of languages in the world. How many languages do you know? Sure, not all people are monolingual. A huge number of people are bilingual, some are trilingual, some even more than that. But discounting the tiny proportion of genius polyglots, a number of languages any given person knows will be within a single digit. So if I, for example, speak 5 languages (I do), what is the added value of having tens of thousands of other languages in the world, for me and my brain?
Absolutely phenomenal video. I'm a professor of linguistics, and I couldn't have done a better job explaining this topic. If the video creator doesn't have degrees in linguistics, they should definitely pursue one - they're a natural.
Bello vedere qualche video sulle lingue italiane in giro per internet. È una parte della nostra cultura che a molti sta a cuore. Personalmente parlo poco lingue simili, ma sono comunque eradicati in ogni nostra città ed è difficile non farsi influenzare da essi. Bel video! Editato btw
Sarebbe anche ora di smettere di chiamarli "dialetti" e cominciare a chiamarli per ciò che sono: lingue. La differenza? Un dialetto è una variante derivata dalla lingua principale. Una lingua si sviluppa parallelamente/ Es. Siciliano, Friulano, Ligure, Ladino, Veneto...
My grandfather was raised in a Venetian community in the countryside of Brazil. It was very traditional, he only learned to speak Portuguese when he was 12 years old, and had the Venetian Language as mother tongue, but never studied the Standard Italian. When he travelled to Italy, he was able to communicate to people in Veneto, and they usually thought he was from there, but when he got into Rome, people didn't even understand what he was saying, so he had to use English there.
@@AndreaBorto ze vero 'sta roba cuà. Mi digo par ezenpio: Benvenjesto e i me amighi veneti de l'Itałia i dize benvejnuo, na variasion de benvenuto. N'antro ezenpio: nuantri cuà dizemo bondì, co' che nte'l veneto, na mucia de zente łe dize bon zorno
Vrnetian language means nothing. It means the dialect of the city of Venice, Venezia, which is very specific and they did not move to Brazil. He probably spoke a overocean vetsiin of his ancestors' native village in the countryside of VENETO ( the region). So in brazil communities they speak an old underdialct from somewhere in Veneto! ( Calked venetan if you wish, but pleade not venetian. Im from there, i know what im saying
@@VRomagnollo si pero' smete' de ciamarlo venetian, vialtri parle' na version antiga de veneto campagnol. E tuti qua i se riferisse a venetian invece ga da eser dito Veneto
It's even more complicated than that. The same language/dialect can slightly change from town to town and some people can get feisty about it. Plus, in some areas (less populated like up the mountains) if you want a job where you interact with the public you are required to know the language/dialect.
vivo in abruzzo. Per quanto io riesca a capire quasi qualunque cosa nel raggio di 50km, comunque c'è una differenza abbastanza sostanziale anche nel raggio di 15 km
The same is happening with the Ryukyu languages in Japan, as both standard Japanese and Ryukyu languages share an ancestor, but despite the Ryukyuan languages being called hōgen (dialect), they're still different languages. Ryukyu languages aren't even mutually intelligible, Okinawa's language is very different from Miyako's. My nan still speaks Okinawa's Uchinaaguchi, but favours Japanese. Younger people no longer speak Uchinaaguchi.
Great video. I'm Sardinian and the slow disappearing of regional languages is a shame, expecially because it was not natural at all. Our grandparents were forced at school to speak italian even though at home and with friends they always spoke Sardinian. My grandmother remembers that sometimes there was also a punishment if the kids answered questions with sardinian words. This process also impoverished Sardinian culture, because every year there is less and less interest in writing a song or shooting a movie in sardinian language, expecially in the south and on the coasts. You centered the point at 7:00, many people don't speak sardinian because it is considered inferior and they are ashamed, they consider it vulgar because now it is mainly spoken by the lower classes. As a kid i didn't think that the disappearing of sardinian language was a tragedy, but as an adult i realized that if someone takes the language from you, they also take the way you are thinking the world. Language is not simply the way you put thoughts into words, it is also HOW you think, and it's a shame that a lot of people don't recognize that
I always wondered why the Sardinian culture is considered inferior to the rest of Italy I would love if u explained why is there some division and hate toward sardinians
@@linaabusriwel1222 there's no hate towards Sardinian. I'm myself a Sardinian living in the north i can assure you, that what you call "hate" is shown more towards Naples or South regions...not Sardinia.
@Riccardo Pibiri thank u for explaining I appreciate it and honestly I think the Sardinian culture is beautiful and should be globally more recognized.
I'm italian and I speak Napolitan dialect fluently (I was born and raised in Naples). When I tell my non-italian friends that I don't only speak Italian but also Napolitan, they look at me funny and think I'm joking. They don't understand that it is literally another language. (found you through your video about lilting, and as I live in Ireland it was super interesting. Have my subscription)
@@alanwhiplington5504 lovely ♥ I have so many memories tied to these songs. This one ruclips.net/video/dlskZWyFBmk/видео.html also in napolitan is one of my personal favorites!
I'd be surprised if you even managed to communicate in Naples with the neapolitan you spoke with your family in the US: you see, a very interesting thing about immigrants and their native language (especially in the past, much less now with so many new ways of communication) is that, moving away from their home, they become isolated from their original linguistic community and that brings their language to follow a completely different evolutionary path from the "original". So it's pretty common for immigrants to teach their children a variety of their mother tongue which doesn't exist (or which doesn't exist anymore) within the original linguistic community.
I'm pretty sure your napolitan got a bit changed even by your life there in USA. The environment changes very easily the way we speak. And even more, you are speaking a variety of napolitan that maybe is not talked anymore in Napoli since it comes from 1800-1900s napolitan emigrants.
I m Italian and I can tell you that Italy is an old country in terms of society, families cares about traditions so I don't think dialect is going to disappear really soon. There are a lot of people that can't speak Italian but just the dialect they know, most of them are elders and they live in small towns, but in South Italy New generations continue to learn dialect even in big cities. We also try to learn something new each other when we meet a person who has different dialect, so I don't think New generations are loosing dialects
I'm from Veneto and with my friends or with family I always speak Venetian. In other regions, like Lombardia, it's almost dead. In my opinion the regions that are most attached to their regional languages are the south Italy, Veneto and friuli
Un video meraviglioso, non posso che farti i miei più sinceri complimenti per la qualità e l'accuratezza con cui hai trattato questo argomento. Bravissimo, se potessi ti abbraccerei. Sono sardo e la mia lingua è chiaramente trattata anche dalla legge italiana in maniera differente, ma penso che le lingue locali siano una importante ricchezza che stiamo rischiando di perdere. A wonderful video, I can only offer you my most sincere congratulations for the quality and accuracy with which you have dealt with this topic. Very good, if I could I would hug you. I'm Sardinian and my language is clearly also treated differently by Italian law, but I think that local languages are an important asset that we are in danger of losing.
I'm Lombard and I completely agree with you. At least your language is recognised by the Italian state even if, as you said, it's not treated as it would deserve to be, our language, instead, isn't even recognised so imagine how delicate is the situation here 💀
I'm Venetian and I sadly tell you that this is true. I know passively Venetian but I can't speak it and if I try in public I feel uncomfortable with myself. This is the logic of the national language. All our beautiful languages will die because of our ignorance and fear. Our culture is dying.
la lengoa la more se te la fe morir, usa el veneto e te vedarè che no'l morirà mia, semo un popolo da migliaia de ani, semo stè boni de vegner fora dal crolo de l'inpero romano e vegnaren fora anca da sta "crisi itagliana"! corajo, ghe vol otimismo, "schei e paura mai avui"
I am Kurd and feel you very well. Our language was banned for decades and still banned to give the education with it. I see a lot of our people do not know it, can not express theirselves confidently or ashamed of speaking in our language. It hurt me and makes me think about it since I was a child. Everyone who care about the linguistic diversity and wanna protect their ancestral language should take an action and do anything they can do for it.
@@Oscopo A year has passed since then and now I know Venetian much better and I'm working with some people to safeguard it (not yet seriously though). I hope for positive results!
The Catalan game plan should be applied to all these languages. Schools half in the local language and half in the lingua franca, all road signs in the local language, all business and signs in the local language. Linguistic diversity should be celebrated.
I'm Italian born bilingual, my mother language other than Italian is Friulian, one of the few recognized by the government. I couldn't have made a better video explaining the drama of Italian languages - bravissimo! I bookmarked your video and will use it as reference to send to some comments I receive on my videos. Thanks for making this. Extremely valuable.
Escribiré en español, no se hablar inglés xd, espero que se pueda traducir como yo puedo traducir los demás comentarios. En Italia no se enseñan los dialectos o idiomas regionales? Soy de España y aquí se enseñan, soy de Cataluña más concretamente y tengo todas las clases en catalan menos las de español e inglés, y pasa con otros idiomas en España.
@@leovigildo9706 En Italia, y la mayoría de los países del mundo, los niños no aprenden las idiomas regionales en la escuela. En Catalonia y el país vasco tiene mucho suerte porque es un caso rarísimo
@@leovigildo9706 españa es uno de los mejores países europeos para ser hablante de los idiomas regionales porq casi todos se reconocen oficialmente (el catalán es el idioma regional más hablado en europa). Mi novia es de catalunya, deseo aprender este idioma hermoso en el futuro. Por ahora, me debo enfocar en el castellano por no ser hablante nativo.
This video exactly sums up my father’s feeling on Sicilian. Even though i am American i have asked him to teach it to me multiple times, as it is a major part of our heritage, even more than that neither of my grandparents were able to speak much English at all, so for the rather brief part of my life that i knew them i had essentially no idea what they were saying. And whenever i asked him to teach me he would always say “No its not worthwhile” and that it is just “Hill-billy Italian” which kinda stings, because its not just about use.
The fact that teachers are forced to correct kids using their local language in order to make them speak only Italian sends a shiver down my spine. This is cultural genocide.
another problem with the italian languages is that many times the regional languages (like Venetian or Lombard, for example) are not fully codified so it's also difficult to even write in those languages or teach them since there's no "official" version of them
@@Billy__Joe fair. Ma trovami una codificazione coerente per quanto riguarda il Veneto, il lombardo, il furlano e molte altre lingue e poi ne riparliamo 👍🏻
@@Billy__Joe onestamente il fatto che ti incazzi e mezzo insulti dimostra che forse hai bisogno di metabolizzare e gestire meglio la rabbia e altre emozioni negative. Spero davvero che un giorno ci riuscirai e diventerai una versione migliore di te stesso lol. In ogni caso ho di meglio da fare di sabato sera che litigare su RUclips quindi ti lascio a gestire la tua rabbia perché qualcuno sta parlando di lingue italiane in generale, non del napoletano in particolare. Bacini 😘
So true, I'm from Cremona and lived in Milan for a while, with my milanesi friends even if we theoretically all spoke Lombard it was impossible to understand each other since we only knew our respective dialects because there's no such thing as a Lombard language, just a wide array of Lombard dialects. And they're so different that for example my father is from a village which is literally 4km away from Cremona and I had to learn his dialect separately from my mother's dialect (cremonese) since it's not just different words but even verbs like "to be" and "to have" have wildly different conjugations.
I'm from Turin, my first language is not Italian but Piedmontese, I'm glad a foreign person is bringing light on this issue so maybe one day we can solve it
You are a giga-chad then 🙏🏻 we need more people who speak as first language their own local language. I'm Lombard and I'm doing my best to learn as much as possible and to try to speak it as much as I can.
@@deckardshaw6696 nope, Piedmontese is a gallo-romance language. While Italian isn't even a Gallo-Romance language. The concept of "dialetto" in Italy is very cursed. Just watch this video which you're commenting and you'll understand.
Coming from Calabry (southern Italy) I can also tell you that in very fee towns is taught an ancent language called "Grecanico", which is obviously very bound to Greek and that it was spoken in Magna Graecia (southern Italy, indeed). The cool thing is that there are still people (generally in mountain villages) who can still speak it as current language. The world is wonderful ☺️
I was about to say I was born in that same area, then I saw your last name :D oh well. I can tell the video is accurate enough when he puts also Grecanico on that map
This is a very similar situation here in the Philippines too. A country with almost 150+ languages considers only Filipino, an artificial language born into law in the 1920s as part of the country's birth of a national identity, and English. The former is supposedly a hodgepodge of many Philippine languages using Tagalog as its grammatical base. And like in Italy, the regional languages are mostly called "dialects". Definitely I would rather like to see a multilingual Philippines similar to South Africa, Singapore, or Switzerland - let us still have Filipino as our National language, but let the 14 regional languages become our country's official languages as well. After all, national unity must not be merely determined by a single form of expression. Or better yet, be like the US and have no legalized official language...
@@moonshinei Even this is not official. Not all regions recognize their regional languages. I am with you on this one. Matter of language must be decided on the City/Municipality level.
@@studiosnch What happens to the languages that are recognized already? Do they teach them at school as subjects or is it possible to take all classes using that language? What about university education?
I am from Florence and I can tell that at least from my experience here the dialect is still very strong and you can really hear it being spoken from everyone. I am a teenager and I always speak with my friends in Fiorentino. I think that the reason because I can't really perceive the linguistic loss is because my dialect is acutally the most closer to the modern Italian. For me learning to write italian in school was not like trying to learn a new language, but just learning how to transcribe the language I already spoke with letters. This video turned out really interesting for me because from my "privileged" perspective it has been kinda weird to watch and to learn how bigger the difference is between Italian and the languages that I used to call dialects.
Italian from Abruzzo. A wonderful video, really, everything you said is accurate. I used to call the different languages spoken all over the country "dialects", but now I know it's wrong. Personally, I've been taught from my parents not to speak our dialect (the one from Chieti, central Italy), but if I had been them i wouldn't have done this HUGE mistake. I now strongly feel like they're dying, because, as it was done with me, it's not taught anymore, neither at school nor at home. And the reason why is just that it's not seen as a real language because it's RUDE! Ma putem ving la guerr...
Tutte le volte rimango stupito per quanto gli abruzzesi siano convinti di non essere meridionali, eppure la storia abruzzese è sempre stata legata al sud. Forse come posizione l'Abruzzo può dirsi centrale, per il resto... Ad ogni modo non posso che applaudire! Bisogna cominciare a parlare di lingue, non di dialetti, anche se lo Stato ha imposto questa mentalità ai nostri nonni, e loro ai nostri genitori, dobbiamo rompere questa catena.
@@ltubabbo529 sono di Chieti anch'io e anch'io mi ritengo un centro-italiano, non un italiano del sud. Nord centro e sud sono posizioni geografiche, non aspetti storici. Non si capisce perchè il Lazio che è di fianco sia centro Italia e l'Abruzzo dovrebbe essere sud. Che poi anche come abitudini e "mentalità" in Abruzzo ci sentiamo più vicini ai confinanti marchigiani e laziali (esclusa Roma che è un mondo a sé) o ai vicini umbri che ai calabresi o ai siciliani. E' una cosa che tra l'altro ho visto confermata per esperienza personale una volta trasferito a Bologna per l'università e ho iniziato a frequentare ragazzi di tutta Italia.
@@ltubabbo529 Sono abruzzese anch'io e dissento totalmente da ciò che dici. Geograficamente l'Abruzzo è tanto centrale quanto il Lazio e culturalmente anche. Addirittura, più di vent'anni fa il mio fidanzato salernitano si rifiutava di discutere con me di alcune questioni perché, mi disse, "Tu sei del nord e non potresti mai capire". Io mi misi a ridere e risposi che non ero di Bolzano, ma lui ribatté "Sì ma tu sei abruzzese, e gli abruzzesi sono come quelli del nord." Vivendo per un certo periodo in Campania, ho capito che aveva ragione lui.
Probably one of the best video about the Italian linguistic situation I've seen on RUclips. I totally agree, the state should give recognition to all our regional languages and promote their use. I feel deep discouragement whenever an Italian says our only language is Italian or that Neapolitan is a dialect for uneducated people. I live in central Italy, the language spoken here has some astonishing and pretty unique grammatical features, such as a new neuter gender (not linked to the Latin one), a different pronoun system and a tripartite space-based adverbial distinction ("ècco", "èsso" and "èllo", where Italian only shows the first of them), still no-one knows about that and it's not considered a language by its own speakers. Thanks for going deeper and sharing with the world the real image of Italy, not that flat green uniform desolate map
I think that's the only time a language has redeveloped a gender within recorded history. Usually the trend tends to be towards slowly getting rid of grammatical genders so that's really interesting.
you are describing a situation that might have been true a generation ago. neapolitan is the dialect for uneducated people?! there are books of poetry published in neapolitan, neapolitan dialect is pretty much understood all over the south (compare that with mine, which i learnt from my mother: gravinese. if you even heard about it, it's because of some film dubbing on youtube), there are conventions about the language, there are italian-neapolitan dictionaries and courses *i* can buy, from a different region and i can learn to speak neapolitan without even having to put a foot in naples.
where are armies and navies of scots, welsh, navaho, rusyn, manchurian, venetian, tamil, chechen etc? They all are languages and they all don't have armies nor navies. So the proverb is false.
@@asbest2092 I think you’re supposed to interpret the quote the other way round. It should mean they’re all languages, both the “official” ones (with their armies and navies) and the ones considered (simple) dialects. In the end is all a matter of historical perspective. That’s what I meant with it, anyway.
@@FilippoTassell I didn't understand what you wanted to say. There are languages without armies and there are armies without languages(Switzerland, Mexico, Egypt etc). The quote is completely false
@@asbest2092 I speak Scots and normal English and Scots is not a language but a dialect of English. Both are mutually intelligible and come from the exact same routes.
Such an accurate video, bravissimi! I'm from Tuscany but my family comes from Sardinia. I'm so proud of my roots and I've always tried to speak Sardinian (unfortunately, I speak it terribly😅). The first language I learned as a baby was Sardinian. My school teachers couldn't understand me, so they forced my parents to make me speak Italian. But I don't surrender! My accent is ridiculous, but I will never let Sardian die!
I'm from Bergamo, northern part of Italy, and I can say that the local dialet 'bergamasco' is still spoken especially in mountain villages and in the countryside. In my family we do speak it sometimes during meetings and family reunions, even with my friends we do use it especially as a sort of way to get comfortable with each other and joke around.
Fortunatamente la parte est della Lombardia ha ancora un ché di lombardo rispetto a quella attorno Milano. Parlare con un milanese ormai è come parlare con il niente, non ha una cultura, un atteggiamento, una lingua, non ha niente. Il massimo che può fare è prendere le mode che vengono dal resto d'Italia e dall'estero, per il resto il milanese è culturalmente morto. (Salvo quei pochi che fortunatamente mantengono certe conoscenze)
This video is very strange and is an almost perfect analysis of the language situation in Italy made by someone far far away (I suppose from the USA) and touches a lot of points deep in the soul. All of us has to learn, speak and keep alive our piece of history as ours grandfather language. Thank you very much for this “masterpiece” if I can call it like this, I really really appreciate it
I'm a Ladin speaker and over here we try to preserve the Ladin language by speaking it to our children and we even learn Ladin at school. It's extremely uncommon that a child doesn't know Ladin. Sometimes it happens that an italian couple transfers here, have a child and they speak Italian to it, but despite that, they still learn about Ladin from friends and from school. I'd wish that the local institute made more with Ladin, like dubbing movies, translating commonly played games (e.g. Minecraft), but they actually don't do much (from what I can tell at least). Nice video, really appreciated!
It’s great to here how Ladin is thriving relative to other languages in Italy, the fact it’s taught in schools is a great advantage. Thank you for your comment!
What might not be understood is that languages such as Ladin are what I call domestic languages. They are suitable for talking about domestic topics - about the minutiae of daily existence but are unsuitable for other matters. An example of such a language is Kurdish. It's very suitable for domestic matters but as soon as Kurdish speakers go beyond the boundaries of the home and family they turn to Arabic. I would imagine that the same applies to Ladin, if not to the majority of the numerous languages listed for Italy. To some extent even Italian is becoming something of a domestic language. It cannot match the creativity of the vast English-speaking universe and the result is the flood of words entering from the English language. To a much less extent, still also from French. There is a view that any language spoken by fewer than 90m (!) speakers is under long term threat.
@@alanwhiplington5504 Not sure what you're talking about, Ladin is a language just like any other. It's not like you can't suddenly speak about science in Ladin and need to switch to German, Italian or English. In the worst of cases, you can use loanwords from other languages if you don't know the specific word in ladin (which is more a skill issue of the speaker, and not a problem related to the language itself) without switching language entirely. I work as an electrician and it's really common that I need to explain some concepts to clients or other workers (and I obviously do it in Ladin if the other person also speaks it, without huge problems). Also, just wondering, what languages do you speak?
I know someone who mods Minecraft. I'll have him teach it to me and make a Ladin mod. Thanks for making a very bored person's life have a little meaning. Mama, I'm preserving languages now!
Thank you for this video. I'm Italian and I noticed something worth mentioning. The generation of my great-grandparent spoke dialects a lot. Basically all of the time. The generation of my grandparents "learned" Italian at school. The generation of my parents nearly forgot the dialects. And now my generation (I'm 18) is adding into the language a lot of English words. That's a phenomenon so widespread that numerous English words are already present in newer Italian dictionaries. Some words are italicized ("postare" from "to post", "skippare" from "to skip", "buggare" from "to bug", "spoilerare" from "to spoil" ecc.) but many are kept the same (account, smartphone, selfie, chat, glitch, hacker, link, loop, ecc.) Please note how, unsurprisingly, all these words come in one way or another from the internet. Language is fluid and I think that's good. However, it's true that globalization is killing linguistic diversity. That's a shame, but I can't help but fantasize about a future in which the majority of the world will talk the same one language. And it probably won't be that far from English.
When I play videogames I don't usually say words like "uccidere, nascere, regalare" I usually say "killare, spawnare, givvare". I use the word "droppare" from "to drop" everytime instead of the italian version "buttare" because it can mean something else
@@Loresette yeah, the majority of terms have a corresponding word in Italian, but some don't. I usually prefer speaking "pure" Italian, and yet, there isn't really a way I can avoid use "droppare" in a videogame, because "buttare" or "lasciare" aren't quite the same thing. It's curious how yeah, every language has its intraducibile terms, but since Italian (and not Italian alone) is borrowing terms from the English language, and still keeping its own intraducibile words, it is somehow becoming more... richer than English? It'll be interesting observing what the future of speech will have in store for us.
Prendere parole straniere e italianizzarle non è necessariamente un male. L'italiano già di per sè ha tante parole germaniche, arabe, greche, spagnole, francesi... Un termine nuovo può ampliare le sfumature che una lingua può esprimere. L'inglese moderno è 3 lingue in una. Una base germanica a cui si sono aggiunti il francese e il greco-latino, oltre a una rifinitura da altre fonti. È chiamato sempre inglese ma è già molto diverso da quello di un millennio fa. Quello che però riformerei in italiano è smetterla di importare senza alcun adattamento. Se la parola "bistecca" viene dall'inglese "beef steak", perchè smartphone, software, hardware, ecc. non potrebbero diventare smarfon, sofuer, arduer, ecc.? Ho visto cose del genere in spagnolo e portoghese con altri termini mentre in italiano i media inventano perfino anglismi inesistenti e sgrammaticati che non significano niente appena varchi il confine. Notate che gli adattamenti che ho proposto non terminano in vocale perchè non è necessario che tutte le parole italiane lo facciano, sennò la lingua si appesantisce nello scorrimento. Però rispettare l'ortografia italiana che è la più semplice tra quelle occidentali dovrebbe essere il minimo. Una volta entravano tanti francesismi e oggi molti li sanno pronunciare ma non scrivere perché non tutti furono riformati all'italiana. Altri termini stranieri invece li tradurrei ma con creatività. Non servono traduzioni troppo letterali che portano a termini o perifrasi lunghe e scomode. Ad esempio "cloud computing" può diventare "nuvomatica" (nuvola + informatica), "weekend" può diventare "fimana" (da "fine settimana" che è troppo lungo per competere con la versione inglese) così come in spagnolo si usa "finde" da "fin de semana". Insomma, con inventiva ci si può sbizzarrire. L'élite politica e giornalistica di questo Paese è però ridicola. I giornalisti di una volta scolpivano la lingua inventando parole ed espressioni che il popolo assorbiva. Oggi invece il servilismo linguistico è spacciato per modernità.
@@vlc-cosplayer Io ho sempre detto "stampante". Mi devo esser perso la novità "printer". Detto ciò, i calchi linguistici sono sempre esistiti. Le lingue si modellano anche sugli adattamenti alla propria ortografia e fonetica. Oggi nessuno si accorge che "implementare, supportare e trincare" sono calchi. C'è però un'altra questione da affrontare. La mente tende all'economicità del linguaggio. Tra due opzioni possibili, tenderemo sempre a preferire quella che impiega meno sillabe. Non puoi battere i monosillabi stranieri con parole quadrisillabiche o usando due parole al posto di una. Servono alternative comode che portino il parlante verso un naturale utilizzo. "Fine settimana" perde contro "weekend". In spagnolo però "finde" compete perché è altrettanto rapido. Non parleremo mai a monosillabi come l'anglofonia ma non si possono neanche proporre alternative che il pensiero scarterebbe per la voglia di andare dritto al punto.
@@vlc-cosplayer meh, preservare le lingue è diverso dall'opporsi alla loro naturale evoluzione, quello che sta succedendo con i dialetti è sbagliatissimo, siccome c'è un'opposizione istituzionale e un'innaturale opposizione culturale, ma l'integrazione della lingua con termini stranieri per indicare concetti che non erano previsti non ha niente di male. "Stampare" stato adottato dal germanico ad un certo punto. Per quanto si voglia far sembrare che sia così, non siamo alla fine della storia.
Wow man, this video is remarkable. I live in Piedmont, but i am 80km from Milan. To my nephew, i speak italian and Piedmont dialect (from my area). His dad speaks Italian and Sicilian (from his area) to him, his mom speaks Italian and English. The thing is that this little man answers in the same language of the question ( Piedmont dialect, Sicilian, English and Italiano ). That's amazing.
i can only say, from venician, that dialects are a blessing, they make u feel more patriotic toward your region, and they can help u to express better with people from your region
I’m Italian and most of the things you said are true, but dialects aren’t spoken in a whole region (I’m from Lombardy so I’m gonna talk about what I know) like people from Bergamo speak a whole different dialect compared to people from Milan or Lodi, almost every big city has its dialect and to my opinion, even if it should be preserved it isn’t useful nowadays to talk with people, I usually speak dialect with my grandmother but normally I use Italian, it’s simpler and way more understandable by everyone, sometimes I use words from dialect while speaking Italian but I don’t find it too much useful nowadays (really it’s spoken like in a 20km radius and than it changes to a different one)
Can relate, it's not really useful to speak a Lombard dialect when you travel to the next little village and can only decipher about half of what they say... You drive 20 minutes to another province and you can't understand a single word
They're not wholly different, that's a myth. There are studies showing, with dialectometry, that Milan and Bergamo speaks very similar dialect. If we can call /y/ shifting to /ø/, /i/ to /e/ (and that's not true for every bergamasco dialect) and some Venetian words... Italian changes at every ASL 😀
@@darilmarra4383 if you can't speak it properly. Clearly if you have a basic level in your own dialect and you don't speak that often you'll have a bad time understanding different dialects. That happens with every language: Irish dialects of English are quite hard to understand for students or L2 which don't use English often.
I don't know if It Is the same outside Italy but here we can choose whether to study religion at school or a bunch of alternatives, and I think the local language should be one of them, It would probably be the most useful too in my opinion.
I’m Italian (from north Sardinia), I watched a lot of videos like this, and this is the first correct video I saw about different languages in Italy 🇮🇹❣️
This is like...the best video made on this topic that I've ever seen, so much so that I'm thinking of showing it to my students here in Australia. Thank you 💖
So as an Italian myself (Friulan) I will say that I speak Italian instead of Friulan not because I consider it "inferior" but because It's more handy....everybody know exactly what you mean etc.....I can speak a bit of my dialect because I assimilated it mainly listening my grandparents speaking. When you go from a region to another people usually speak Italian with each other and you may recognize their origin from their accents.Probably in the next 50-100 years my dialect will be dead, that's kinda sad but also inevitable
senza contare che il friulano è incredibilmente diverso dall'italiano rispetto ad altri dialetti della regione. Probabilmente se senti parlare un Triestino o un Goriziano in dialetto risci a capire il 70% di quello che dice. Io del Friulano davvero non capisco niente.
@@mence5992 in effetti il veneto è sosprende tempo vicino all'italiano, se pensiamo che è diviso da esso dalle lingue gallo-italiche e confina con quelle retoromanze che sono, tutte, ben diverse dalla lingua di Dante.
fantastic video btw. came here after watching your lilting video. I’m not a film enthusiast by any means but I really admire your production quality, sound quality (microphone isn’t picking up weird crap!), etc. I hope your channel gets real big you deserve it for the amount of work you’ve put in, imo.
Italian here, I'm speechless to see someone so interested in our languages/dialects. I personally speak Italian, "pavese' (dialect from Pavia, small city in the Lombardia region) and English. I always thought that pavese (my dialect) was 100% useless and In some ways it is, I'm 31, I can safely say that over 90% of my friends can't speak the dialect at all, i was lucky enough to learn it from my grandparents and my father (I also learned a bit of sicilian from my mother and my other grandparents but i can't really speak it) most of the people in the city itself don't speak the dialect anymore, only those in the small towns and villages on the countryside do. But I remember that when I was a kid in elementary school they did teach us the dialect a bit, we had to read and translate poems in our dialect and that was amazing, nowadays nobody does that, not a single school in the whole city. Anyway, I'm really happy that I found this video, it's amazing to see people from other counties so interested in our languages/dialects. Fun fact about my city that also applies to a lot of cities in the whole of Italia, we speak 2 distinct dialects here depending on wich side of the city we grow up (the city is split in half by a river) potentially speaking, the amount of dialect in the whole country is amongst the largest you can can find in any country in the wolrd wich is one of the many reasons why I love my country, we have a saying that I love that reflects perfectly the many differences we have here (bot culturally and linguistically) "paese che vai, persone che trovi" wich means "for every town you visit you'll find different people" (not a literal translation obviously)
@@bartsimpson8616 I'm sorry to correct you but in italy you must study english, you start study it at age of 6 or sometimes even before and you continue ti study untill yuoi end your scolastic career at about 20 years old and than if you go to university you continue studying it, it isn't our first lenguage so is obvious that we can make a few mistakes but about every italian that went to school in the last 35-40 years know at least basic english
@bart simpson there are lots of people here actually- but only some ( like me :> ) speak it correctlyand know more grammar and terms to use in sentences and texts :P
@@kappa1463 che ci vuoi fare purtroppo è questa la nostra reputazione per via di centinaia di show/film/giochi dove siamo stereotipati al massimo e non si tratta neanche di una cosa vecchia perchè in alcune media recenti è ancora cosi.
My mother speaks Milanese and my father speaks Molfettese. When you compare them, they are so incredibly different despite being developed in the same country.
Wow, I'm italian (from Trieste), and I'm quite impressed by your video. It's reeeeeeeally precise and has focused on the real point: "dialects" (as we name them) are part of our heritage. Great video, see ya soon (cocolo video, se vedemo mulon!)
i’m italian and, i have to say, i am impressed by this video for how good you got the point. You said only things that i already knew but it was amazing seeing how well you understood it all. I am very impressed, great work
I think a distinction must be made between northern and southern languages: while in the north the regional languages are rapidly fading, in the south they are generally speaking alive and well. Neapolitan for example is still developing new slang, and it's used a lot in popular forms of art such as music, theater and cinema. It is true though that, particularly in the past, in middle class households parents would prevent their children from speaking the "dialect" as it was thought that this would affect their ability to switch to proper italian when the context required so. I, a native speaker of Italian and Neapolitan, remember my parents used to say this a lot to me when I was young: "speak properly" which meant "don't use neapolitan". Of course, this in most cases wouldn't work: it is almost impossible not to pick it up, even from the same parents that would tell you to always speak proper italian, as everybody are virtually in a situation of dyglossia, and luckily so, since it is not true that people grow up incapable of speaking proper italian as well.
A big reason for that may be that Northern Italy has attracted a huge number of internal migrants during the last centuries: you can't use your dialect if a considerable percentage of the people around you can't speak it, and northern dialects, being stigmatized and replaced by Italian in all of the mass-media, never had the strength to attract migrants into learning them. They're only lively in rural areas that never managed to attract migrants. My regional language, Romagnol, is at least witnessing a small revival, but it's mainly confined to restaurant and festival names, fixed expressions and small poetry festivals. It's still not considered "cool" to make a nationally-relevant pop song or a tv series in Romagnol, as happens with Neapolitan or Roman. Romagnol, like most other languages from the north, is also too different from Italian to easily mix the two languages in everyday speech.
@@LucaPasini2 I agree. These are the main two reasons why northern regional languages faded: on the one hand, they are generally speaking too different from standard italian, unlike southern languages that belong to the same branch of romance languages; on the other hand, internal migration as you said.
@@TheMyth92 i would add thay the northern dialect don't have the privilege of a big literature and music culture there's for dialects like Neapolitan or Sicilian or for acting like for roman So we don't have any positive rappresantion and we youngs have even less reasons to want to learn it
As a Neapolitan I can confirm, teenagers speak more neapolitan among each other than italian, and a lot of songs, even TV series are made in neapolitan. Southern dialects are still very alive.
Thank you for this video. I come from the Marches (the light blue!) and I confirm that, even in this area, under the name of "Central Italian dialects" hundreds of variations exist, from a village to another. And being now in Veneto, I confirm having to learn another language !
As an Italian (I'm from Vicenza) I must say this video is very accurate (also the "come xéla" part), and I recognize you the fact that you made a distinction between all Venetian dialects (in fact, if you listen to the Western Venetian, it has some differences with the Central or the Eastern)
Im from Germany learning Italian and fell for Sicily (particolamente Palermo, ci sono solo le arancine e basta!) The people are just so nice and beautiful, the history is rich, the food is buonissimo and the cultures that have intertwined there… it’s simply amazing and I hate that Sicilian is not considered its own language but a mere dialect, yet Sardinian is. (Nothing against Sardinian though) Also maybe because Im from the East of Germany I can relate to being stereotyped as less educated, speaking an awful dialect, working a low paid job or being more of a „rural mindset“ if you get my drift, which is why I may also connect to Sicilians (and southern Italians in general) more in that way. But yeah I can attest that although I really love the Sicilian and Italian languages both, I am not holding the same attitude towards my native language. I dare not speak in a dialect (because Im aware of the association) and Im embarrassed when people do, and I try to speak as standard German as possible. BUT I do must say this attitude has changed since Ive been studying linguistics. I grew up in Saxony but my family is from Brandenburg/Berlin, so at home I grew up with a Brandenburgihian/Old-Berliner dialect and was outside of home surrounded by the Saxonian dialect (considered the worst dialect). But now since I moved to Berlin I really leaned a lot into my family‘s dialect and I absolutely love it (so much that I even can’t comprehend that people wouldnt like that dialect haha) I dont care what people say, when someone speaks Brandenburghian/Berliner to me, that‘s just home. (But apart from that I still dont like hearing other German dialects, especially Saxonian, though. Except for the Viennan dialect. That is so beautiful)
Probably the best video about languages in Italy, as you suggested in the end of the video most languages are protected due to the fact that they're spoken by minorities (not just lingiuistic but also ethnic) alongside the border and as such it is felt as a political need to protect them, especially in contrast with what was done during the fascist regime where even in the recently conquered Istria and Dalmatia Italian was the only permitted language; so much so that linguistic minorities are protected by the 6th article of the Costitution of Italy (regarded as one of the best, it might be worth a look). But probably more should be done to protect every language. Also remember that big parts of Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli-Venezia Giulia came to be part of Italy only after the Great War so much later than 1861 year in which even Rome wasn't part of Italy. I think the inner migration from south to north has had a great role in the lost of non official languages, as evrything got more mixed, for example you can here people speaking somewhat of Venetian but with a Neapolitan accent because they grew up in Veneto but their parents are neapolitans. From Venice: ciao vecio ;)
i remember when i was very little i was used to speak in my dialect but i was always being corrected by my teachers who used to tell me "you cant say it" instead of "it's not italian" and maybe thats why i've always felt ashamed and stopped speaking my dialect gradually. but then during the time i was in middle school i started to find all these diversities so intriguing, i wanted to learn more of my local language that i was always so afraid to speak
Great video! I'm Italian from Sardinia, and even if Sardinian is technically recognized as a language, and not a dialect, it is still not preserved at all. Because of its status Sardinian should be taught by law, but it isn't, there's a lot of neglect from the government and as of now very few people speak it fluently (also people could not agree on which Sardinian was more "correct", the southern or the northern, which lead to a lot of Sardinians not accepting the official version) because of that the Langue of my people is dying. I'm saying this because even if, yes, a language is officially recognized, it sadly doesn't guarantee its safety
Because even Sardinian has differents dialects, we constantly argue about what is to be considered "proper" main language (Logudoro? Limba Sarda Comuna?). Even though I think the best version is the Baroniese. A disclaimer is needed to provide some funny contest about the last phrase, which was intended to be ironic. Failure to specify this could result in civil war in my beloved land XD. For our foreign friends: you have to be Italian to understand how my people (Sardinians) can be a little... touchy for basically everything, especially when you talk about our language. Damn, i even feel almost offended to be not included as endangered species in this video.
@@ita-bel704ma non è vero! A sassari parlano sassarese e non capiscono il logudorese (zona che dista pochi km) Tutta la sardegna è così, ognuno parla la sua versione di "sardo'.
@@ita-bel704 No, la gran parte della popolazione parla le due principali varianti del sardo: logudorese al centro nord e campidanese al sud. Sassare e Gallurese, all'estremo nord, sono dialetti di derivazione corsa, che a sua volta è una lingua che deriva dal toscano antico. Infine ad Alghero si parla catalano e a Carloforte il ligure.
@@nbwaf continuate a scrivermi di varianti ma il mio ragionamento non cambia, qualunque variante sia parlata nella sua specifica zona anche i bambini la parlano quindi ( per me ) non c'è nessun pericolo di perdere la nostra lingua in favore dell'italiano.
Sicilian here! We don't understand each other either, trust me. Also, great video! I always thought Sicilian was a dialect which then graduated as a full fledged language, but I was evidently wrong. Bravo!
@@sieben8724 In in Sicily they have their own regional dialects. I played Sicilian sung sung by Giuseppe Di Stefano (who's from the Catania region) to my Palermo parents who couldn't understand the words he was singing.
I really liked this video. I’m italian and what you said is 100% true. One of the things I totally love about my country is the amount of dialects you can find. This is a really complex topic, and I hope that this diversity remains
Thank you so much for this, I don't know why you wanted to make this, but it's super well informed, (I swear most videos on this get something wrong, this was a refresher) and I stand with you absolutely. The Stigma IS real, I live in Sicily, and my mother never taught me Sicilian, she actually always tried to NOT have me learn it, always on the basis that if I were to slip up and talk Sicilian when I shouldn't have to, that I'd get deemed ignorant and/or stupid. I thus never learned Sicilian, and I can't speak it. I can understand most of it, as I've heard it my whole life, but I to this day have no idea how to speak proper Sicilian. I wish I could learn, being a Language Nerd is so cool when I notice things about my own language, which for its stigma does not have common or even any documentation. The actual Sicilian Language is also influenced by Standardized Italian, so a lot of words are near extinction. I hope I can do something to keep the tradition alive. Again, Thank you lots for the amazing video. I hope the diversity of this country can become a point of pride to unify the people of this place and forget the stigmas and prejudice. Thank you again. As a Language Nerd, but as an Italian first and foremost.
Hello there! I just wanted to clarify that no matter where you live in Alto Adige (South Tyrol), you will learn Italian. The german schools all teach Italian (as well as standardized german) because ultimately we are part of Italy and therefore should also be able to speak it. Some people just find it hard to learn because they only speak german, but that doesn't mean that it isn't taught in schools. Thank you so much for this video I love seeing people interested in our country
As a person from Southtyrol I agree on what you say. The fact that you wrote down "German" in quotes represents that it is not the usual german language but a dialect that originates from austria. You can hear differences even in different parts of Southtyrol. But what makes it so special is that the southern part of this country gets more mixed with italian. At the same time, every town has its own italian dialect again. Resulting in a combination of austrian dialect phrases with italian synonyms of their town. Of course, talking with italians is for many actually difficult as many still refuse to learn this language. In any case Southtyrol is home to 3 language groups. Austrian Dialect(German), Italian and Ladin.
Austrian-bavarese it's a separate language from german, why do you call it german? I've never understood this custom of the Germanic peoples, even if you don't understand each other, call everything German.
@@ltubabbo529 I agree. But yeah this is exactly the point... nowadays if other similar languages are heard everyone connects it immediately with the standard German... Hence the reason I say that so no discussion will occur. Otherwise, as we all know the web, one will always want to be right over the other
I'm Italian, from Friuli. My parents chose to only speak Friulian with me, even when we were not living where Friulian is spoken, and I'm so glad they did: even if Italian and Friulian are very similar languages, growing up "bilingual" has only advantages imho. It's easier to dissociate words from objects and not to introduce idiosyncrasies of one laguage into the other. As for Italian, I learnt it thanks to schooling and television.
Hi I live in Canada and my parents were from Orcenico Superiore (small village outside of Pordenone). My parents also spoke Friulan to my sister and I, we still speak it now. My parents/we had many friends here in Canada who were also from Friuli around the same area as my parents and I'm also very glad we could all speak together. We also learned Italian which is very close as you say. We learned it mostly from attending weddings and parties at our local Italian Club and watching Italian movies. When at the Club everyone just slipped into Italian effortlessly, but you would still be able to hear all the differnt dialects around the hall, Roman, Calabrese, Siciliano, Genoese, Bergamese, it was wonderful!😁
The regional language map that you used is very detailed but, as an Italian, i think that all the languages and dialects that are spoken in italy are impossible to map because, in my experience, the language slightly change even between two bordering towns. I very enjoyed this video by the way because i never thought that there were non-italian people who care about this. Thank you ❤️
Indeed, it's a "continuum" of similar dialects almost everywhere in Italy, except perhaps for that red line (in the video map), i.e. the boundary between Gallo-Italic and Italo-Dalmatian, where the change is pretty heavy in just a few miles.
Italian from Friuli here and I can say your video is 100% accurate. I personally speak one of the many Venetian dialects and also Friulian (apart from Italian and British and American English) and this because as a kid I'd hear my parents and grandparents speak in such languages, and so in the end basically I ended up absorbing them
Dimmi se ho ragione, ma avendo parenti in Friuli ho notato il dialetto ha qualcosa sia di slavo che di spagnolo. Non posso fare altro che chiedermi se magari le regioni "marittime" (nel caso del Friuli intendo per esempio da Trieste) non abbiano delle influenze da tutto il Mediterraneo, appunto perché mi spiego le influenze slave ma non quelle spagnole. Per indicazione, i miei parenti sono vicino alla Carnia
@@martinap863 Allora, l'influenza slava c'è di sicuro, poi tra l'altro in Carnia, vicino al confine aggiungono un po' di austriaco. Riguardo all'influenza dello spagnolo non so niente, però c'è da dire che in effetti qualcosa di simile si nota. Io sono, diciamo, più o meno del nord-ovest del Friuli, per cui capita che i dialetti siano anche influenzati dal veneto
I'm watching this as an Italian(from Tuscany) I love seeing people learning about my country, this is stuff that's so deep rooted in my daily life, I don't even pay attention to it
It is kinda sad how linguistic uniformity was enforced in Europe as part of the nation building process and I feel like to some degree it might be starting to cause trouble even for those languages that became national languages since they're starting to get dominated by the larger international languages like English. In the same process a lot of culture was erased and instead a copy pasted idea of national culture was forced on everyone which in many situations just ended up killing the culture all together, I don't think anyone cared about these things once it just became an empty symbol of nationalism. Fundamentally culture is stuff people do to have fun and it ceased to be fun when it stopped being local and became national.
I mean, the romans made half of Europe speak Latin. Even in other places like Northern Africa. Yet, even after Latin became spoken from London to Alexandria (not exactly but whatever), it splintered organically and mixed with, or influenced, the cultures that came to dominate areas of the old empire. So there is no rule, just people passing. Italy have always been invaded and influenced by many different people and cultures. Germans, Greeks, Arabs, Celts, Slavs, Franks, Etruscans and on and on.. Plus the italics peoples of course. It looks like a non-problem. The main difference is that today we can communicate with many more strangers. Now we can use the phone or social medias and communicate in yet another language (if you speak more than one) to people from other parts of the world. The scale is different The evolution continue I’m bad at English But I’m chilling
This video is so accurate! I was born in the Veneto region and I was taught by my dialect-speaking grandparents not to speak dialect because "it's not proper", so I never learned. I've now lived in several northern italian regions and while I do mostly understand the dialects the people around me speak, I can't speak them myself because I was taught never to speak dialect. Speaking dialect at school is also discouraged as it's seen as "boorish" and ignorant, as if speaking dialect makes you "dumb" while speaking italian makes you "smart"; for example if a kid while speaking italian uses a verb wrong just because that's how that verb is used in the dialect they're used to, they're treated like an ignorant donkey and mocked for it. this is the mentality that's gradually leading to our "dialects"/"languages" becoming more and more endangered...
Found your channel after the lilting video (which was funny, informative, and entertaining) :D I'm a writer and I often look for information about languages, so it was really helpful! I don't actually have any story to use it in, but I might in the future XD Speaking of Latin, I recently found out about this undeciphered codex called the Voynich Manuscript. If you haven't heard of it, you might find it interesting :)
Hallo! Person from the Venice area here. The video is very well done and I'm actually gonna use it to explain the linguistical situation here in Italy to international friends. Just one curiosity: in Veneto we never refer to "western veneto" " southern veneto" etc... When we talk about language. We usually locate the dialect indicating the city. In Venice area alone there are at least 4 major variations of Veneto: margherotto (from Marghera), veneziano (the OG from Venice), Mestrino (from mestre) and chioggiotto (from Chioggia. This one is almost literally a separate language). We often say things like: "ahhh, ma ti xe da belun?" (Ah, so you're from Belluno) when we identify the origin of the person based on the variation of Veneto they are speaking, or on the accent that they use for standard Italian. In Veneto mountains then, there are valleys where they have their own specific Veneto. Long live Veneto language! Let's not make these languages die, they are beautiful and immensely rich Uh, another very interesting thing: in Brasil there are people speaking Talian, wich basically is Veneto, with Portuguese, piemontese, German and other eastern Europe influence. So cool to find my regional language spoken in another continent! FYI: modern venetian is a mixture of venetian language, developed in the venetian empire + Spanish (cuz we were dominated by them for a while) + some German (cuz we were under Austria for a while)
Veneto region has NEVER been conquered by anyone but, in late 1800, JUST for a couple decades by Austria. Let's say has never been under anyone then. In fact it's always been an indipendent country unlike many other italian ones.
Also Veneto is still spoken in its former territories of Istria Dalmazia and Greek Islands. Unlike any other italian language, Veneto is spoken abroad by its former Venetian citizens.
Hello! I'm Italian from Naples, thank you for this video! I had just one thing to say: neapolitan is spoken just in Naples and in some towns around the city 😀 even in the Campania region itself exist a lot of other dialects, more than one for every province... So imagine from region to region the number of dialects spoken 🥲 Molise, Basilicata ect have different dialects. Maybe similar to neapolitan, but still different ♥️
Thank you for your comment. The reason the whole south of Italy is colored the same is because we say that they speak one language with many dialects. For convenience, we call this language Neapolitan. Obviously this is confusing because Neapolitan is what many Italians would call the specific dialect of Neapolitan that is spoken around Naples. Other people call this language other things; some people call it Neapolitan-Calabrese, and some call it Continental-Southern-Italian. I think the name Neapolitan works well because of the history of the region. The reason I don’t have Molisano, Pugliese, Abruzzese, etc. on the map is because it is not a map of the dialects of Italy, it is a map of the languages of Italy. We say that Molisano, Pugliese, and Abruzzese are all dialects of this language called “Neapolitan-Calabrese” or just “Neapolitan”. I hope that helps with the confusion, thank you again for commenting.
It’s funny to see how many Italians in the comments refer to their local language as dialect. I am a native Tuscan speaker and as we’re told in school our language is where Italian comes from, I used to speak Tuscan with people from other regions. Only after I realised it wasn’t always clear for others to understand what I was saying. Other Italians told me how parents or grandparents didn’t speak the local language with them, not to “spoil” the nice Italian they were learning in school. Like Sardinian, that was perceived as a shepherds language in the mainland…nowadays we should teach local languages in school. All languages are important!
Wow, I am a guy born in Veneto and living in Veneto and this video is really accurate. Fun fact: in my living area there are many variations of venetian dialects that differ from town to town, or even from a side to another from the river Piave. Even the Dialect spoken in Venezia is really different from for example, the Treviso dialect. All Europe has this situation mainly because of our story. Great video btw
Interesting video! I'm neapolitan, so I'd like to add a few words. It's important to note that, as you said, when Italy was first unified, very few people only from higher classes knew italian. That is until television became more common. That's when specific TV shows were born with the sole purpose to teach italian to the common illiterate people (dialects and other languages in Italy are spoken, rarely written). It was at that point that the idea that Italian is a superior language was born. My dad came from a cultured family, and when he was a child, he was prohibited by his parents to speak neapolitan, as the idea was born that it was a language only for illiterate country people. Still, when he was out with his friends and out in the world in general, he learned it and is now passing it on to me and my brother. While nowadays many neapolitan words have become disused or have been completely lost, I think neapolitan is partly leaving behind it's negative stereotypes, also thanks to many neapolitan icons in the past and present who have shown Italians the beautiful culture of our area and its language!
When i was in primary school, we had to do a play at the end of every year. One year, the play was partly in Ligurian, and the play was even about the generational divide between the older, rural population (that spoke Ligurian) and the younger (that only spoke italian). We had to learn a bit of Ligurian for it! When i asked my father to teach me, he told me that it wasn't worth it, that no one taught him well and that i would only make a fool of myself to the older folks in our area. It makes me sad that these languages are slowly dying. There are even old songs from before WWI that we learn in school but that's the only way we learn them by now. Italy's population is apparently 24% of people over 65 years old, yet as they slowly pass, they teach less and less about the old languages in favour of "the most useful one". Very good video!
I assume it was one of Gilberto Govi's classics, right? Has to be :) Fellow Ligurian-born here (Ponente), and yeah Govi's plays (which are played MOSTLY in Italian, strongly accented and with a lot of Ligurian-isms when performed for an Italian speaking audience) often feature at least one character who (generally because they became rich recently) insists on "speaking proper Italian", exaggerating the pronunciation and making gross mistakes (because they, too, are NOT Italian speakers and are only affecting it to sound important).
Hi, I'm from Venice (Veneto), my boyfriend is from Udine (Friuli). We feel this a lot. Friulano is recognised as a language and is also thought at school, but he always complained that the teacher was from southern italy, and so wasn't really able to teach the language properly. But to the point of the video: we speak to each other in italian, I don't have much of an accent, he does more, but at first we really had trouble understanding each other sometimes because there were lots of linguistical barriers, things that I didn't even know were dialect or that I used differently. Know after 5 years together we learned to understand each other and what is dialect and what is italian, teaching also each other our languages. It's incredible the level of difficulty in this, especially because our region are near, it's just one hour travel, and Friuli was also under Venetian government for centuries, but nonetheless the languages are so different
I feel this a lot. Io sono piemontese (ma della zona in rosa nel video, dove il dialetto è sotto il lombardo), quando vado a trovare i cugini di Udine faccio una fatica boia a capire quando parlano tra di loro (strettissimo poi) e soprattutto mi dimentico di lasciare a casa il mio dialetto, anche se qualcosina lo hanno imparato da nostra nonna. Però "vonde" lo uso tutti i giorni, anche a casa, quando mi versano l'acqua nel bicchiere
I live in Trieste and speak Triestino. Everyone speaks it. When you go to a shop or a restaurant the shop assistants or the waiters speak to you in Triestino and the Italian outsiders are a bit shocked by this haha it differs from the Veneto dialect because it has its own peculiarities and there are German words (because of the influence Austro-Hungary had) and Slovenian words, as there has always been a Slovenian minority in Trieste.
i am Danish and have norwegian family, so i understand norwegian, even some of the most obscure dialects. i have gone to school in Sweden and can speak swedish. i went to a school near Umeå in northern Sweden for sport related reasons and i found that the languages of swedish and norwegian sort of merged the closer you got to the border region, and also the further north i went i Sweden. there where still grammar differences but it sounded the same to my ears.
My family is from Calabria and I've been having to learn Italian as most of what I know is actually Sicilian and not Italian. So I've been going around for a long time telling my friends that I speak English and Italian, when in truth I probably speak English and Sicilian as my native tongues. It was annoying at first to discover I basically have to learn a new language, although very similar to my native language, just so I can understand a greater part of my people.
I m Sicilian and i found your experience interesting I would like you to write me some sentences in sicilian to see how Much i m able to understand since i grow up speaking italian only and sometimes struggle understanding some words Se adesso parlassi della mia giornata e del fatto che il canto degli uccellini è bellissimo ma mi sta dando un mal di testa assurdo, mi capiresti?
@@thehuman805 unfortunately I'd have no clue on how to write it and wouldn't want to embarrass myself with a jumbled mess as we have only spoken the language to each other.
I'm form Ferrara and our dialect comes partially from French. Unfortunately here people consider their own dialect "rude", and that's why it's slowly and quietly disappearing. I don't, and instead consider it an important part of our traditions and history. That's also thanks to one of my friends that very often speaks using Ferrarese with us and it's just too fun to hear! IMO we should be more proud of it. Anyway thanks for your really accurate video about our culture! :)
I know exactly what you mean. My wife is from Cacurri, Calabria (un villagio al vicino di Crotone). I learned Italian from books and from her. When I first visited her village and spoke with the people there, non ho capito un cazzo! They were all speaking "Cacurrese", until they realised I didn't understand and changed to the Italian they'd learned at school. But they were all very proud of their language and even offered to teach me a few words. Marvellous people. MsG
Il ferrarese è stupendo, ma penso di essere l'unica persona con meno di trent'anni di mia conoscenza che lo sappia parlare fluentemente. Addirittura alcuni miei amici che abitano proprio a Ferrara non capiscono una parola se mi metto a parlarlo! Cosa si perdono a non dire "maial" all'inizio di ogni frase...
@@saturninespheres Davvero? Eh, anch'io in effetti ho solo quel mio amico che lo usa, io lo so abbastanza, ma non perfettamente. Ho trovato un dizionario online :D tu sei della zona?
This point has already been reached. The last generation to use dialect in my family was my grandfather's. My parents only say a few words, and I only understand but not speak at all. The thing is my family moved a few times (Liguria, Lombardia, Veneto) so for us it doesn't makes sense to speak a dialect that nobody speak around us. And does make even less sense to learn the local dialect when you can use just italian.
It is basically the same thing for italian languages. Venetian is considered a language by the Brazilian government (there are small communities of Venetian speakers there) but isn't by the Italian government.
You should mention the internal immigration that is present in Italy. People from South go to North, so the only way to understand each other is to speak Iitalian. That may be a reason why in northern part of Italy dialects are dying and why in the South dialects still have much more importance.
Hi!I'm from vicenza veneto. And I can speak English Italian and venetian and in school we study French. Teachers encourage us to speak Italian at school,but at home I speak venetian. Love from veneto ❤🇮🇹
There are literally words and pronunciations that change between the city I live in (6 000 habitants) and the ones that are around me, you don't even know how much confusing and complex learning dialects can get. There are just some unique words we have, and there is not any "official Italian" counterpart to explain the same concept in just a single word.
I live in the countryside of Romagna, it's a rural place with lots of old towns, and although people under 60 normally speak Italian, elders use dialect when talking to each other, which is so confusing sometimes I can't understand my grandma, all elders know Italian but they never use it unless they're speaking to a stranger. What's even crazier is that the words vary depending on the town you were born in. My town has 400 inhabitants and has lots of neighboring towns, but they all have their sets of words, for example.. the word "broom" or "kid" can change with just a 5 minute drive. Of course it makes sense cause what is now a 5 minute drive once was a 20 minute walk and some roads are very steep so it wasn't that easy to reach other places when cars weren't so largely available. People born after the sixties like my parents, had television, school buses and such, so from then they all speak common Italian. Most people who were born after the eighties barely even know any dialect, I don't know any I can't even understand it.
The biggest problem is that every Italian teacher forces you to abandon your dialect/language and any use of it (even verbal!) is penalised in school, it's like they don't even care about any language in the first place.
I should have made this comment some time ago, but it's better late than never!
I make a pretty glaring mistake in this video: I try to define a difference between 'language' and 'dialect' at around 5:20.
What I want the people watching this video to understand is that the difference between what we consider languages or dialects in common speech is purely political. There is absolutely no concrete line that exists which can help differentiate between languages and dialects. Things like mutual intelligibility don't matter whatsoever. The reason that in Croatia they speak 'Croatian' and in Serbia they speak 'Serbian' is the same reason why in Italy we say that someone who speaks Neapolitan and someone who speaks Venetian both speak dialects of 'Italian'; this reason is politics.
I still believe the video as a whole holds a good message and is educational, and for those reasons I will leave it up. Still, I wanted to inform the viewer of my mistake so that hopefully they don't make the same mistake themselves.
Thank you for watching.
Great video man!
Love from Italy 🇮🇹
Can you do Maltese and the Siculo-Arabic language??
That's true, it has a political sense, but actually there are some other languages recognised in italy in addiction to those in the map at 6:36. Take a look here!
it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_mochena
Yeah… in Italy we have more than 1.000 dialect we don t understand each other sometimes
I think the difference between a dialect and a language are national borders and a standing army!
My Italian teacher said that the greatest unifier of the Italian language is the TV. Suddenly, everyone in Italy could hear the same Italian.
true story. in fact, there was a programme in the 1950s called "non è mai troppo tardi" (it's never too late) that taught illiterate people to read, write and speak proper italian. and it was proper italian indeed, with the correct, accent-less pronunciation and grammar nazi attention to rules. ruclips.net/video/eb-Sv6OILqU/видео.html
it had an enormous success. TV unified a lot of things and those bemoaning the decline of dialect should pay attention to other, infinitely more negative impacts it had to the society as a whole.
it was actually the radio. Television is just some sort of the advanced radio.
@@asbest2092 Cinema as well. For a period of time, all movies screened in Italy had to be dubbed into Italian, by law.
@@SimonMas Have you even watched the video? The languages Oscopo is talking about are not dialects of standard Italian. They're sister languages. Standard Italian isn't even a spoken language. It's a standardized form of 12th century Tuscan.
Also, wiping out other languages and cultures in the name of efficiency is not only unethical, it's a huge loss for science, anthropology, and linguistics. It's basically the same thing white people did to the natives in America. Ban their language, destroy all traces of their culture, and if they don't cooperate, kill them. If they didn't do that, it would've negatively impacted the whites' society because then they wouldn't have been able to use the natives as free labor.
Also war. People were taught italian in order to be able to fight and follow orders during ww1 and 2. Then came the TV which helped a lot.
Da italiano sono felice che c’è gente che approfondisce la nostra cultura
Stesso se io sapessi il veneziano ne sarei fierissimo
Si,sono contento che c'è qualcuno che si interessa alla nostra cultura
Anch'io sono felice si quello
Lo stesso per me
Già
I studied Italian so that I could speak to my Italian Grandmother. Once I became fluent I was shocked that she was struggling to speak with me. I then found out that she didnt speak Italian. She spoke Napulitano. She learned Italian in school like I did, but it wasnt her native tongue.
My fiancés family is from Napoli as well and I understand NONE even though I learned italian at Uni for 3 Semesters 😂👌
Woow. Amazing
@Roberto Biagio Randazzo I’m trying to find from any Italians if in their area there is a movement at least to preserve a local language, if not to make it official. Are there any for the Lombard language? Do the locals care or not?
When someone speaks Neapolitan in Italian movies or TV series (such as Gomorra) there are usually subtitles in Italian, otherwise nobody outside Neaples would understand...
@@dzimidrol475 they're far from extinct
Fun fact about dialects in Italy: each city, town or village has a different dialect even if they are only few kilometres far from each other
Sì, è vero
Mia nonna parla dialetto Bresciano, letteralmente a due chilometri da casa la barista parla bergamasco
si bello, non è una particolarità che ha solo l'Italia e che la rende speciale, è così in tutta Europa se non in tutto il monto apparte le americhe
@@tommasopandolfi1750 mah non so onestamente fino a che punto. Per farti un esempio: da me "che cosa?" si dice "cik jaj?". Nei paesi limitrofi si dice "c ghé?" "ce da?" "ciò bà?" "ce de?" "ci je?". Questa cosa nelle altre lingue non l'ho mai vista se non nelle nazioni arabe
vero
I'm Italian and I'm honored to see someone who cares and delves into our culture
ma se é una delle più conosciute e interessate
The people of the world are obsessed with all things Italian. Everyone wants to be Italian. Italian food, art, music,fashion, etc is adored.
@@bunnylarese2161 but Mussolini Is One of our big mistake
@@bunnylarese2161of course i want to be italian
@bunnylarese2161 This is just factually incorrect. I can tell you lack respect for other cultures. Italian culture is beautiful and rich, so naturally many people enjoy learning or indulging in it. Immigrants from Italy also brought things like pizza to New York which lead to its globalisation. (Although part of why Italian food is so popular is because pasta/pizza is relatively easy to make and easy to incorporate different things. Example, in Korea they have all sorts of different toppings on pizza.)
However liking a culture doesn’t make you obsessed with it, and certainly doesn’t make you want to be that nationality. Don’t get a big head or a big ego, there’s plenty of nasty things about Italian history as well as beautiful. No one world culture is perfect, just as none is better than another. And at the end of the day we are all human. How about a little respect?
I lved in Italy for 14 years. When I got there, I knew a handful of Italian words: pizza, lasagna, ciao, and that was about it. I was in the area near Napoli, fell in love and stayed. I primarily learned Italian, but I couldn't help but be intrigued by the lical language, Neapolitan. It is beautiful and full of feeling as well as unique ways of expressing things. I gradually became fairly proficient in both. When I traveled to different parts of Italy, some people, noticing my accent treated me as if there were something wrong with me. I later lived in the Marche, and my children had more of a local accent, as we lived in Fano, province of Pesaro Urbino. I kind of drifted between dialects, depending on who I was speaking with. After all, I was living there, not just a tourist, and the degree of complexity was that of native speech. People would often ask where I was from. I rold them I was American. Some folks referred to me as " that American with the Neapolitan accent." It was pretty funny. I learned to speak Italian without a particular accent and got a stranger reaction. They acted as if they were speaking with someone who came out of a TV. Also funny. Then I would speak the local Fanese dialect and, bingo, I was one of them.
American with Neapolitan accent in Pesaro/Fano… I bet people’s jaws dropped when you also drank a moretta or ate a rossini.
At that point you stopped being a foreigner who knows the language and became a local.
That's cool, I'm from Marotta, near Fano and I have many friends from Fano, but I never heard of an American with a neapolitan accent
curiosità: capisci quello che scrivo o l'hai dimenticato?
From Pesaro here, that’s funny
Italian here, from the very north.
All is very accurate, but it's even more complicated than that: each language spoken in a region is divided in even smaller dialect, and each of them with significant differences.
Sometimes we even have different words for the same concept within a 50km radius.
Some regions are holding on to their languages more than others, but due to internal migration within Italy, there are a lot of children that does not speak the regional language of their own parents because is not used where the family actually lives.
True, I am from Brescia province, basso garda Bresciano, we have some linguistics influence from Venetian, I have friends from val Trompia and they do not pronounce the S sound, they replace it with an H. And some words are different from town to town.
West Turin guy here, other than piedmuntese we also have another dialect, more similar to French compared with our dialect. It is an older dialect and very few people know it here. It's called "patois", here in Chisone valley I know only a bunch of people that can speak it. I cant.
In Aosta Valley the “official” dialect is the patois. And EVERY village have some difference in their patois. But this dialect is dying because the new generations doesn’t want to apprend it (including myself)
@@x_pole_i1184 Probably because it's useless outside of that specific place where it's spoken unfortunately, which means nobody has much desire to make sure it gets passed on.
fozza napoli ragazzi,Napoli napoli napoli
The sad thing is, this has been going on all over Europe. Dutch, French, German, Spanish, all of these have been taking the place and seat of a whole cast of small and beautiful languages now considered nothing but "dialects". This video, and Italy as a whole, are a beautiful case study on this injustice.
All these dialects are dying, it's just sad
I’m fluent in Italian and understand piemontese word for word but can’t speak it. Also English and understand a lot of Spanish but can’t speak much.
Sadly true, we should study these languages to keep them alive, curiously many people (like me) don't like to say Spanish but Castilian, which is at least a very small step in the right direction...
I'm from Rome and I have friends all over Italy: communication isn't impossible since of course we all learnt the same italian in school, but I do sometimes blurt out words from my own dialect and the others stare at me confused. I have a hard time knowing what words are italian and what words are roman because i speak roman with my friends and family and so sometimes i'm like "yo in Naples do you guys say *word*?" it's so fascinating that we are a single country with so much language diversity.
I was married to a Roman for 5 years and although 40 years have passed since our divorce I retain an affection for canzone romano, Trilussa and er Sor Capanna
I have the same problem, proprio col Romanesco! Pensavo che fossi l'unica con questo problema!
Its the same in also bery small european countries, like mine, but I wont’t say its name cuz you guys hate us for some reason lol
@@Pollicina_db FRENCH SPOTTED
I had to move to Rome a few years ago and I know this feeling. As the Roman dialect is, overall, pretty similar to Italian, if you don't run into some words that are completely different from standard Italian, you get used to the grammar quirks quite easily. It's also a really popular in mainstream culture, as Roman and Neapolitan are usually the only dialects widely used on tv or in music, so usually every Italian has had at least a grasp of them.
But when I tried to explain to a foreign friend that in Rome they say, for example "er" instead of "il", cut verbs and articles and prepositions, she was kind of terrified.
It also happens to me to say a word or an expression that would be normal in the regional variety of Italian I would speak in my hometown and see people around me really confused. The most obvious one is placing articles before female first names, it really drives people crazy
I'm Italian, from Bari (South East), and I can tell you: it's hard to understand each other when people in different towns (even only around Bari) speak their own dialect. It happens in some contexts. Like most old people struggle to speak proper italian because of their strong accent, sometimes they try to translate literally some words or concepts from dialect to Italian and it's kinda funny. :D
lol vero
Esatto! La pronuncia cambia anche da paese a paese, come io, leccese, posso non capire qualcosa che tu dici in barese
Anch'io sono di Bari, della frazione di Palese-Santo Spirito. A casa abbiamo sempre parlato italiano, ma conosco anche il dialetto, ma solo perché l'ho imparato per conto mio; infatti la famiglia di mia madre non ha mai parlato dialetto, mentre quella di mio padre sì. Peccato che mio padre non sia di Bari, ma di Giovinazzo, quindi mi sono ritrovato a parlare giovinazzese a Bari... un casino assurdo per capirsi. Ovviamente i miei compaesani percepivano il giovinazzese della mia parlata, ma per via della zona in cui ho vissuto ho integrato nel mio vocabolario termini e suoni del barese estranei al giovinazzese, quindi quando andavo a Giovinazzo i locali percepivano il barese. Poi mi sono trasferito a Roma. I romani sentono il barese e i miei parenti ora sentono il romano... non so più neanche io cosa sono.
Al nord il problema non è così estremo, fatichi a capire i vecchi con i loro dialetti ma a parte quello bene o male si capisce
I'm Salentino and I worked in Ruvo di Puglia, and I struggled to understand "S' cap' ?" (trad. "Hai capito?) and other expressions.
i'm venetian, and i remember being a kid and wondering what was the language my parents spoke with my uncles, aunts and grandparents because they rarely spoke italian to each other (that hasn't changed, even now) and i remember calling it "adult language". As i grew up i knew a few words but didnt really speak it until i met some new friends in middle school who often spoke it semi-ironically because it sounds really funny when you scream it like an angry farmer so i started doing the same. Today i feel like i'm not speaking it as much but this video made me realize how important it is so im gonna start using more often
veneto stato
angry farmer 💀💀
Vara ti
@@alexandro112 è proprio questa l'immagine che viene data dalla propaganda italiana anti identitaria al "dialetto". Anche se sono lingue regionali di tutto rispetto che derivano dal latino. In Veneto ad esempio si è sempre parlato Veneto non italiano, si parlava Veneto anche negli ex territori veneti di Istria Dalmazia e Grecia e lo si parla ancora al giorno d'oggi (sempre meno però). In Veneto sono scritte opere letterarie.
Col fascismo e il suo lavaggio del cervello però sono state tutte relegate a lingue obbrobri (e lo sono tuttora). I giovani non le parlano più quindi sono destinate ad estinguersi.
No bro non iniziare a parlare come i contadini veneti. Continua a parlare italiano! 😂
I live in the Dolomites and I speak Ladin at home. This language is very different in its dialects depending on the valley where is spoken, some are very difficult because more archaic than other. It is fun that everyone in Italy (except in my area) can’t recognize at all my accent, it is one of the most neuter of all language of Italy, for example a Venetian or a Neapolitan can be recognized very easily.
Uguale andavo a scuola in Val di Fassa e c’era la materia di Ladino. Peccato che non l’ho imparato. Ma concordo l’accento, anche nel mio caso nessuno lo azzecca mai indipendentemente da dove vengono😂
Dalla mia esperienza fino a questo momento il Ladino è quella lingua che se non ascolti sembra italiano, se ascolti ti rendi conto che non capisci una parola
I'm Ladin too (from Cortina) and you are right, we have almost no accent. Everybody finds that I'm from the north of Italy, but nobody can find exactly where
Which Ladin valley do you come from? I'm "gardenese", so it's always nice to meet some neighbors on the Tube
Il problema non è che è neutro,bensì che sono pochi i fruitori di questa lingua in confronto ai veneti ed in particolare ai napoletani,siciliani,romani ecc; cosicché l'accento ladino è quasi sconosciuto al resto degli italiani.
My father is Italian. When he came to Australia as a boy in the sixties, his teachers thought he was dumb and couldn't speak. It wasn't until they heard him speak Italian in the yard that they approached the local Convent to work as translators. The nun, on her first day, quit because she couldn't understand a word my father was saying - he was speaking Abruzzese, and the nuns had never learnt it.
This year I travelled to Italy to scatter my Nonna's ashes over the Apenines. I speak limited Italian, but I can get by outside of cities. It was incredible to hear my father's native tongue and how distinct the difference is between standardised Italian and Neapolitan dialects. Negations and prepositions all sounded slightly different, which was the way I spoke them as a child but was told to forget when learning formally.
It felt like a bit of my Nonna survives in her language, which is incredibly heart warming.
In am from Abruzzo and i can confirm our dialect is one of the most far from italian
@@vitoa.giannantonio7160 di dove sei? I miei nonni erano à Fraine, vicino Molise.
@@samuelsisti4849 io abito vicino Pescara
@@welch1284 io sono metà Piemonte e metà Siciliana tbh
@@Funkin_GDJ3ll0 tbh non ha senso nella tua frase
Hi there, i'm italian from Verona (Veneto)!
Thank you for this video, i always said that dialects in Italy are more similar to languages than variation from italian. My family and the place i live in still have the important tradition of using venetian more than italian, even because the elders were never taught italian in the first place since it's a very rural zone more focused on agriculture than progress.
Just a note: Venetian is the language yes, but instead of saying "central venetian" we use the cities in the region to differentiate the variations. So i use veronese, a person from Venice will use veneziano and so on.
Fun fact: in my region the more towards the mountains you go the less italian you'll hear lol.
da veronese concordo pienamente
grande fra!
that's why is a dialect it doesn't exist a standard version of it and every place speaks in a different way...the funny thing about Italy that you're convinced that you're very different when Italy is one of the few countries in the world that are really homogeneous
gg fra- anche se sono del sud stessa cosa :] ci sono tanti dialetti e io a malapena capisco il dialetto della mia città lol-
Woowowo, strong statement bro, on the coast we say the same about more inland areas. The more you go towards the mountains and Lombardia, the more Italian you are. That said, Venetians have a very much strong identity, some of my teachers used to teach in Venetian rather than Italian at school, and I'm 21. It's still very much alive even in the young population, which is rad nice
As an Italian I can tell you this is so well written and I can confirm every single word. The fact that language isn't taken care of much in this world is truly a shame, especially since it has been proven that preventing language death improves people's lives.
I speak one of the many dialects of Sicilian, and I cannot tell you how many times I have dreamt of holding a school book in Sicilian in my hand, or hearing the news in my native language. Things need to change quickly, but honestly I'm not that optimistic. I'm barely not a kid and speak Italian 90% of the time, if the government don't do anything, my kids won't speak my language.
Every little bit helps, even from across the pond, so thank you for this video!!
Thank you for commenting, I appreciate anecdotes a lot!
"it has been proven that preventing language death improves people's lives." - what would such proof look like?
I can't get past what a hassle it must be to have so many languages in such a small area. "I'll be driving 200 miles south today. Good thing I spent three years in university studying their language!"
@@muskyoxes The goal of language is to communicate, not to accomodate learners. Therefore, there IS proof, the improvement just doesn't include people who are not from the area. And why would it?
Also, I don't want to get into too much detail or too argumentative, but language is never just language. It's culture, identity, sometimes (unfortunately) politics, which means that some people feel like their local language was taken away from them through the means of shame and in the name of a nation that existed just in the Italian elite's mind. So keeping it alive sends the message that people who know it can speak it and not be ashamed of it.
Now, I wouldn't say I'm not Italian, I'm just as Italian as I am Sicilian, and the experiences that unify Italians have existed for centuries now (language included). But why should I consider Sicilian, which I hold in my heart as dearly as Italian (like many people), a "hassle", just for the sake of learners? I just don't think that's fair.
Also, it's only a "hassle" because it wasn't standardised, it's not taught in schools, the use in media is highly stigmatised, so there are no resources for learners. If it was promoted, used in administration, etc., then maybe people who move to Sicily will have a chance to learn it as much as families who move to Finland, for example, and their children have to learn at least some Swedish (because it's an official langaguage there). And there are many other examples of countries who do this, so why should Italy be different in this regard?
Remember that "Italian" is just a label. People might not be "just" Italians.
And to answer your question: what would such proof look like? Just look up on Google Scholar "does language revitalization improve health".
@@muskyoxes sad fucking take man
@@amormir8280 there are tens of thousands of languages in the world. How many languages do you know? Sure, not all people are monolingual. A huge number of people are bilingual, some are trilingual, some even more than that. But discounting the tiny proportion of genius polyglots, a number of languages any given person knows will be within a single digit. So if I, for example, speak 5 languages (I do), what is the added value of having tens of thousands of other languages in the world, for me and my brain?
Absolutely phenomenal video. I'm a professor of linguistics, and I couldn't have done a better job explaining this topic. If the video creator doesn't have degrees in linguistics, they should definitely pursue one - they're a natural.
I completely agree with you. I too noticed and praised his expertise in explaining linguistic subtleties.
Why you have lgbtq flag in your profile picture, if you are professor in linguistics.
Bello vedere qualche video sulle lingue italiane in giro per internet. È una parte della nostra cultura che a molti sta a cuore. Personalmente parlo poco lingue simili, ma sono comunque eradicati in ogni nostra città ed è difficile non farsi influenzare da essi. Bel video!
Editato btw
Si molto bello
Sarebbe anche ora di smettere di chiamarli "dialetti" e cominciare a chiamarli per ciò che sono: lingue. La differenza? Un dialetto è una variante derivata dalla lingua principale. Una lingua si sviluppa parallelamente/ Es. Siciliano, Friulano, Ligure, Ladino, Veneto...
ma se non li parla quasi nessuno? a parte le zone più arretrate ed ignoranti d' italia il che dice molto sulla quesitone
@@LucaOrtolano sono dialetti
Forza napoli
My grandfather was raised in a Venetian community in the countryside of Brazil. It was very traditional, he only learned to speak Portuguese when he was 12 years old, and had the Venetian Language as mother tongue, but never studied the Standard Italian. When he travelled to Italy, he was able to communicate to people in Veneto, and they usually thought he was from there, but when he got into Rome, people didn't even understand what he was saying, so he had to use English there.
There is more. Your venetian is likely the venetian of 1900 so it is quite more genuine than our,which is mixed with italian.
@@AndreaBorto ze vero 'sta roba cuà. Mi digo par ezenpio: Benvenjesto e i me amighi veneti de l'Itałia i dize benvejnuo, na variasion de benvenuto. N'antro ezenpio: nuantri cuà dizemo bondì, co' che nte'l veneto, na mucia de zente łe dize bon zorno
Vrnetian language means nothing. It means the dialect of the city of Venice, Venezia, which is very specific and they did not move to Brazil.
He probably spoke a overocean vetsiin of his ancestors' native village in the countryside of VENETO ( the region). So in brazil communities they speak an old underdialct from somewhere in Veneto! ( Calked venetan if you wish, but pleade not venetian. Im from there, i know what im saying
@@AndreaBorto not venetian, veneto, venetan. Venetian is the dialect of Venezia, and they rarely emigrated to brazil
@@VRomagnollo si pero' smete' de ciamarlo venetian, vialtri parle' na version antiga de veneto campagnol. E tuti qua i se riferisse a venetian invece ga da eser dito Veneto
It's even more complicated than that. The same language/dialect can slightly change from town to town and some people can get feisty about it. Plus, in some areas (less populated like up the mountains) if you want a job where you interact with the public you are required to know the language/dialect.
Vero. Per esempio Palermitano e Catanese sono totalmente diversi, nonostante siano entrambe siciliane.
@@halogame9716 totalmente? E che sono, arabo e islandese? 🤣
Ma anche solo in Toscana come ho scritto nel mio commento, tra Livornese, Pisano e Fiorentino c'è una differenza abissale.
@@sciking8756 siamo lì, siamo lì...
vivo in abruzzo. Per quanto io riesca a capire quasi qualunque cosa nel raggio di 50km, comunque c'è una differenza abbastanza sostanziale anche nel raggio di 15 km
The same is happening with the Ryukyu languages in Japan, as both standard Japanese and Ryukyu languages share an ancestor, but despite the Ryukyuan languages being called hōgen (dialect), they're still different languages. Ryukyu languages aren't even mutually intelligible, Okinawa's language is very different from Miyako's. My nan still speaks Okinawa's Uchinaaguchi, but favours Japanese. Younger people no longer speak Uchinaaguchi.
That's terrible. It deletes parts of a country's identity, in my opinion.
Great video. I'm Sardinian and the slow disappearing of regional languages is a shame, expecially because it was not natural at all. Our grandparents were forced at school to speak italian even though at home and with friends they always spoke Sardinian. My grandmother remembers that sometimes there was also a punishment if the kids answered questions with sardinian words. This process also impoverished Sardinian culture, because every year there is less and less interest in writing a song or shooting a movie in sardinian language, expecially in the south and on the coasts. You centered the point at 7:00, many people don't speak sardinian because it is considered inferior and they are ashamed, they consider it vulgar because now it is mainly spoken by the lower classes. As a kid i didn't think that the disappearing of sardinian language was a tragedy, but as an adult i realized that if someone takes the language from you, they also take the way you are thinking the world. Language is not simply the way you put thoughts into words, it is also HOW you think, and it's a shame that a lot of people don't recognize that
I always wondered why the Sardinian culture is considered inferior to the rest of Italy I would love if u explained why is there some division and hate toward sardinians
@@linaabusriwel1222 there's no hate towards Sardinian. I'm myself a Sardinian living in the north i can assure you, that what you call "hate" is shown more towards Naples or South regions...not Sardinia.
At least it'll always be immortalized by Nico e i Sardi. also there's no real hate towards sardinia cause we barely remember it exists
@Riccardo Pibiri thank u for explaining I appreciate it and honestly I think the Sardinian culture is beautiful and should be globally more recognized.
@@EmanueleBlackBulbToscano but why this dislike towards the southern region ?
I'm italian and I speak Napolitan dialect fluently (I was born and raised in Naples). When I tell my non-italian friends that I don't only speak Italian but also Napolitan, they look at me funny and think I'm joking. They don't understand that it is literally another language.
(found you through your video about lilting, and as I live in Ireland it was super interesting. Have my subscription)
Very heartwarming comment, new video soon!
And it is a very beautiful language.
ruclips.net/video/DjlBKawlKgc/видео.html Enjoy!
@@alanwhiplington5504 lovely ♥ I have so many memories tied to these songs. This one ruclips.net/video/dlskZWyFBmk/видео.html also in napolitan is one of my personal favorites!
@@steveneardley7541 it is indeed. Old and poetic with a lot of power in how it sounds. I'm glad you think so btw :)
I grew up speaking Neapolitan in my family (USA) and had a tough time communicating in the northern region of Italy.
thank you for sharing
I'd be surprised if you even managed to communicate in Naples with the neapolitan you spoke with your family in the US: you see, a very interesting thing about immigrants and their native language (especially in the past, much less now with so many new ways of communication) is that, moving away from their home, they become isolated from their original linguistic community and that brings their language to follow a completely different evolutionary path from the "original". So it's pretty common for immigrants to teach their children a variety of their mother tongue which doesn't exist (or which doesn't exist anymore) within the original linguistic community.
I enjoy telling "Italian Americans" that they don't actually speak Italian
@@giovanniacuto2688 idem
I'm pretty sure your napolitan got a bit changed even by your life there in USA.
The environment changes very easily the way we speak. And even more, you are speaking a variety of napolitan that maybe is not talked anymore in Napoli since it comes from 1800-1900s napolitan emigrants.
I m Italian and I can tell you that Italy is an old country in terms of society, families cares about traditions so I don't think dialect is going to disappear really soon. There are a lot of people that can't speak Italian but just the dialect they know, most of them are elders and they live in small towns, but in South Italy New generations continue to learn dialect even in big cities. We also try to learn something new each other when we meet a person who has different dialect, so I don't think New generations are loosing dialects
But in the North Is slowly dieing
In Northwest Italy native languages are very clearly getting extinct soon.
I'm from Veneto and with my friends or with family I always speak Venetian. In other regions, like Lombardia, it's almost dead. In my opinion the regions that are most attached to their regional languages are the south Italy, Veneto and friuli
Un video meraviglioso, non posso che farti i miei più sinceri complimenti per la qualità e l'accuratezza con cui hai trattato questo argomento. Bravissimo, se potessi ti abbraccerei. Sono sardo e la mia lingua è chiaramente trattata anche dalla legge italiana in maniera differente, ma penso che le lingue locali siano una importante ricchezza che stiamo rischiando di perdere.
A wonderful video, I can only offer you my most sincere congratulations for the quality and accuracy with which you have dealt with this topic. Very good, if I could I would hug you. I'm Sardinian and my language is clearly also treated differently by Italian law, but I think that local languages are an important asset that we are in danger of losing.
you have to speak in english im an italian but other people don't know italian
@@matteolongagnani7068 bro....almeno leggi tutto...
@@matteolongagnani7068 ha messo la traduzione infatti 😅
@@matteolongagnani7068
And you most read the whole text before you write something...
😂😂😂😂😂
Sorry bro... Senza offesa eh!!!
I'm Lombard and I completely agree with you. At least your language is recognised by the Italian state even if, as you said, it's not treated as it would deserve to be, our language, instead, isn't even recognised so imagine how delicate is the situation here 💀
I'm Venetian and I sadly tell you that this is true. I know passively Venetian but I can't speak it and if I try in public I feel uncomfortable with myself.
This is the logic of the national language.
All our beautiful languages will die because of our ignorance and fear.
Our culture is dying.
I appreciate your opinions and anecdote
la lengoa la more se te la fe morir, usa el veneto e te vedarè che no'l morirà mia, semo un popolo da migliaia de ani, semo stè boni de vegner fora dal crolo de l'inpero romano e vegnaren fora anca da sta "crisi itagliana"! corajo, ghe vol otimismo, "schei e paura mai avui"
I am Kurd and feel you very well. Our language was banned for decades and still banned to give the education with it. I see a lot of our people do not know it, can not express theirselves confidently or ashamed of speaking in our language. It hurt me and makes me think about it since I was a child. Everyone who care about the linguistic diversity and wanna protect their ancestral language should take an action and do anything they can do for it.
@@Oscopo A year has passed since then and now I know Venetian much better and I'm working with some people to safeguard it (not yet seriously though). I hope for positive results!
@@buarath9 It's amazing to hear that you've decided to put the time into learning Venetian better. I wish you plenty of good luck.
The Catalan game plan should be applied to all these languages. Schools half in the local language and half in the lingua franca, all road signs in the local language, all business and signs in the local language. Linguistic diversity should be celebrated.
I'm Italian born bilingual, my mother language other than Italian is Friulian, one of the few recognized by the government. I couldn't have made a better video explaining the drama of Italian languages - bravissimo! I bookmarked your video and will use it as reference to send to some comments I receive on my videos. Thanks for making this. Extremely valuable.
Escribiré en español, no se hablar inglés xd, espero que se pueda traducir como yo puedo traducir los demás comentarios. En Italia no se enseñan los dialectos o idiomas regionales? Soy de España y aquí se enseñan, soy de Cataluña más concretamente y tengo todas las clases en catalan menos las de español e inglés, y pasa con otros idiomas en España.
@@leovigildo9706 En Italia, y la mayoría de los países del mundo, los niños no aprenden las idiomas regionales en la escuela. En Catalonia y el país vasco tiene mucho suerte porque es un caso rarísimo
@@Oscopo gracias por responder, ojalá no se pierdan esos idiomas
@@leovigildo9706 españa es uno de los mejores países europeos para ser hablante de los idiomas regionales porq casi todos se reconocen oficialmente (el catalán es el idioma regional más hablado en europa). Mi novia es de catalunya, deseo aprender este idioma hermoso en el futuro. Por ahora, me debo enfocar en el castellano por no ser hablante nativo.
@@Oscopo kids in Friuli can opt to learn friulian at school
This video exactly sums up my father’s feeling on Sicilian. Even though i am American i have asked him to teach it to me multiple times, as it is a major part of our heritage, even more than that neither of my grandparents were able to speak much English at all, so for the rather brief part of my life that i knew them i had essentially no idea what they were saying. And whenever i asked him to teach me he would always say “No its not worthwhile” and that it is just “Hill-billy Italian” which kinda stings, because its not just about use.
@Roberto Biagio Randazzo strano, un randazzese a Milano...
The fact that teachers are forced to correct kids using their local language in order to make them speak only Italian sends a shiver down my spine. This is cultural genocide.
Tò pà era sulu un suca-ova tradituriri e fetusu . Iddu era a vergogna dà Sicilia non era a Sicilia a soa vergogna!
another problem with the italian languages is that many times the regional languages (like Venetian or Lombard, for example) are not fully codified so it's also difficult to even write in those languages or teach them since there's no "official" version of them
And words sometimes change from town to town.
@@Billy__Joe fair. Ma trovami una codificazione coerente per quanto riguarda il Veneto, il lombardo, il furlano e molte altre lingue e poi ne riparliamo 👍🏻
@@Billy__Joe onestamente il fatto che ti incazzi e mezzo insulti dimostra che forse hai bisogno di metabolizzare e gestire meglio la rabbia e altre emozioni negative. Spero davvero che un giorno ci riuscirai e diventerai una versione migliore di te stesso lol. In ogni caso ho di meglio da fare di sabato sera che litigare su RUclips quindi ti lascio a gestire la tua rabbia perché qualcuno sta parlando di lingue italiane in generale, non del napoletano in particolare. Bacini 😘
@@Billy__Joe average napoletano
So true, I'm from Cremona and lived in Milan for a while, with my milanesi friends even if we theoretically all spoke Lombard it was impossible to understand each other since we only knew our respective dialects because there's no such thing as a Lombard language, just a wide array of Lombard dialects.
And they're so different that for example my father is from a village which is literally 4km away from Cremona and I had to learn his dialect separately from my mother's dialect (cremonese) since it's not just different words but even verbs like "to be" and "to have" have wildly different conjugations.
I'm from Turin, my first language is not Italian but Piedmontese, I'm glad a foreign person is bringing light on this issue so maybe one day we can solve it
You are a giga-chad then 🙏🏻 we need more people who speak as first language their own local language. I'm Lombard and I'm doing my best to learn as much as possible and to try to speak it as much as I can.
Bro il piemontese è un dialetto, non una lingua
@@deckardshaw6696 nope, Piedmontese is a gallo-romance language. While Italian isn't even a Gallo-Romance language.
The concept of "dialetto" in Italy is very cursed. Just watch this video which you're commenting and you'll understand.
;-;
@@deckardshaw6696 se fosse un dialetto deriverebbe dal fiorentino
Coming from Calabry (southern Italy) I can also tell you that in very fee towns is taught an ancent language called "Grecanico", which is obviously very bound to Greek and that it was spoken in Magna Graecia (southern Italy, indeed).
The cool thing is that there are still people (generally in mountain villages) who can still speak it as current language.
The world is wonderful ☺️
I was about to say I was born in that same area, then I saw your last name :D oh well. I can tell the video is accurate enough when he puts also Grecanico on that map
Amazing!! 😍😍😍
This is a very similar situation here in the Philippines too. A country with almost 150+ languages considers only Filipino, an artificial language born into law in the 1920s as part of the country's birth of a national identity, and English. The former is supposedly a hodgepodge of many Philippine languages using Tagalog as its grammatical base. And like in Italy, the regional languages are mostly called "dialects".
Definitely I would rather like to see a multilingual Philippines similar to South Africa, Singapore, or Switzerland - let us still have Filipino as our National language, but let the 14 regional languages become our country's official languages as well. After all, national unity must not be merely determined by a single form of expression.
Or better yet, be like the US and have no legalized official language...
And also spanish in filipinas…
But why 14 and not all the 150+ languages? That would make your country one of the most progressive ones in the world, wouldn’t it?
Just 14? We have so many languages with so much variety. Why only the elitist “regional” languages?
@@moonshinei Even this is not official. Not all regions recognize their regional languages. I am with you on this one. Matter of language must be decided on the City/Municipality level.
@@studiosnch What happens to the languages that are recognized already? Do they teach them at school as subjects or is it possible to take all classes using that language? What about university education?
I am from Florence and I can tell that at least from my experience here the dialect is still very strong and you can really hear it being spoken from everyone. I am a teenager and I always speak with my friends in Fiorentino. I think that the reason because I can't really perceive the linguistic loss is because my dialect is acutally the most closer to the modern Italian. For me learning to write italian in school was not like trying to learn a new language, but just learning how to transcribe the language I already spoke with letters. This video turned out really interesting for me because from my "privileged" perspective it has been kinda weird to watch and to learn how bigger the difference is between Italian and the languages that I used to call dialects.
‘Fiorentino’ is just like Italian, but spoken with spinach in your teeth.
Genealogically speaking... Italian is a dialect of Fiorentino 🤣
Fiorentina is spoken without the C, they have difficulty pronouncing it. I find that they are the funniest people of Italy, in a good way.
Siamo i' meio che tussei grullo
Grande maremma 'ane
Italian from Abruzzo. A wonderful video, really, everything you said is accurate. I used to call the different languages spoken all over the country "dialects", but now I know it's wrong. Personally, I've been taught from my parents not to speak our dialect (the one from Chieti, central Italy), but if I had been them i wouldn't have done this HUGE mistake. I now strongly feel like they're dying, because, as it was done with me, it's not taught anymore, neither at school nor at home. And the reason why is just that it's not seen as a real language because it's RUDE!
Ma putem ving la guerr...
Abruzzi.. Hilly area. Duchy Spoletto. Kingdom Romagna
Tutte le volte rimango stupito per quanto gli abruzzesi siano convinti di non essere meridionali, eppure la storia abruzzese è sempre stata legata al sud.
Forse come posizione l'Abruzzo può dirsi centrale, per il resto...
Ad ogni modo non posso che applaudire! Bisogna cominciare a parlare di lingue, non di dialetti, anche se lo Stato ha imposto questa mentalità ai nostri nonni, e loro ai nostri genitori, dobbiamo rompere questa catena.
guarda mbapì che ij t'avev dett trecentomila, no trecend
@@ltubabbo529 sono di Chieti anch'io e anch'io mi ritengo un centro-italiano, non un italiano del sud. Nord centro e sud sono posizioni geografiche, non aspetti storici. Non si capisce perchè il Lazio che è di fianco sia centro Italia e l'Abruzzo dovrebbe essere sud. Che poi anche come abitudini e "mentalità" in Abruzzo ci sentiamo più vicini ai confinanti marchigiani e laziali (esclusa Roma che è un mondo a sé) o ai vicini umbri che ai calabresi o ai siciliani. E' una cosa che tra l'altro ho visto confermata per esperienza personale una volta trasferito a Bologna per l'università e ho iniziato a frequentare ragazzi di tutta Italia.
@@ltubabbo529 Sono abruzzese anch'io e dissento totalmente da ciò che dici. Geograficamente l'Abruzzo è tanto centrale quanto il Lazio e culturalmente anche. Addirittura, più di vent'anni fa il mio fidanzato salernitano si rifiutava di discutere con me di alcune questioni perché, mi disse, "Tu sei del nord e non potresti mai capire". Io mi misi a ridere e risposi che non ero di Bolzano, ma lui ribatté "Sì ma tu sei abruzzese, e gli abruzzesi sono come quelli del nord." Vivendo per un certo periodo in Campania, ho capito che aveva ragione lui.
Probably one of the best video about the Italian linguistic situation I've seen on RUclips. I totally agree, the state should give recognition to all our regional languages and promote their use. I feel deep discouragement whenever an Italian says our only language is Italian or that Neapolitan is a dialect for uneducated people. I live in central Italy, the language spoken here has some astonishing and pretty unique grammatical features, such as a new neuter gender (not linked to the Latin one), a different pronoun system and a tripartite space-based adverbial distinction ("ècco", "èsso" and "èllo", where Italian only shows the first of them), still no-one knows about that and it's not considered a language by its own speakers.
Thanks for going deeper and sharing with the world the real image of Italy, not that flat green uniform desolate map
I greatly appreciate your comment, thank you for sharing about Neapolitan. Hopefully you can share this video with others so more people can be aware.
@blahblahblah1312 what's the matter?
I think that's the only time a language has redeveloped a gender within recorded history. Usually the trend tends to be towards slowly getting rid of grammatical genders so that's really interesting.
you are describing a situation that might have been true a generation ago. neapolitan is the dialect for uneducated people?! there are books of poetry published in neapolitan, neapolitan dialect is pretty much understood all over the south (compare that with mine, which i learnt from my mother: gravinese. if you even heard about it, it's because of some film dubbing on youtube), there are conventions about the language, there are italian-neapolitan dictionaries and courses *i* can buy, from a different region and i can learn to speak neapolitan without even having to put a foot in naples.
@@SimonMas I live in Italy and the situation is still the same
For a video with so few views this was extremely interesting, informative and well narrated. Subscribed and looking forward for more.
Thanks, there will definitely be more
“A language is a dialect with an army and navy.”
- Max Weinreich
where are armies and navies of scots, welsh, navaho, rusyn, manchurian, venetian, tamil, chechen etc? They all are languages and they all don't have armies nor navies. So the proverb is false.
@@asbest2092 I think you’re supposed to interpret the quote the other way round. It should mean they’re all languages, both the “official” ones (with their armies and navies) and the ones considered (simple) dialects.
In the end is all a matter of historical perspective.
That’s what I meant with it, anyway.
@@FilippoTassell I didn't understand what you wanted to say. There are languages without armies and there are armies without languages(Switzerland, Mexico, Egypt etc). The quote is completely false
@@asbest2092 I speak Scots and normal English and Scots is not a language but a dialect of English. Both are mutually intelligible and come from the exact same routes.
@@radec1566 1 - scots is a language.
2 - you haven't disprobed any of my words. And you even shouldn't. I told you the facts, know them.
Such an accurate video, bravissimi! I'm from Tuscany but my family comes from Sardinia. I'm so proud of my roots and I've always tried to speak Sardinian (unfortunately, I speak it terribly😅). The first language I learned as a baby was Sardinian. My school teachers couldn't understand me, so they forced my parents to make me speak Italian. But I don't surrender! My accent is ridiculous, but I will never let Sardian die!
so you speak Sardinian with a Tuscan accent?
@@chamaleon1963 basically
Adesso lo voglio sentire uno che parla sardo ma saltando le c
Chad 🗿
La Sardegna si porta sempre con orgoglio 💪
I'm from Bergamo, northern part of Italy, and I can say that the local dialet 'bergamasco' is still spoken especially in mountain villages and in the countryside. In my family we do speak it sometimes during meetings and family reunions, even with my friends we do use it especially as a sort of way to get comfortable with each other and joke around.
Pota! I'm from bergamo too (e parlo bergamasco soprattutto quando sono arrabbiata 😂)
Brao dighel
im from bergamo too e se provo a parlare dialetto finisco a parlare in calabrese, ma a win is a win i guess
Fortunatamente la parte est della Lombardia ha ancora un ché di lombardo rispetto a quella attorno Milano. Parlare con un milanese ormai è come parlare con il niente, non ha una cultura, un atteggiamento, una lingua, non ha niente. Il massimo che può fare è prendere le mode che vengono dal resto d'Italia e dall'estero, per il resto il milanese è culturalmente morto. (Salvo quei pochi che fortunatamente mantengono certe conoscenze)
E' il problema della metropoli milanese. Se sali già a Como/Varese, noti la differenza.
This video is very strange and is an almost perfect analysis of the language situation in Italy made by someone far far away (I suppose from the USA) and touches a lot of points deep in the soul.
All of us has to learn, speak and keep alive our piece of history as ours grandfather language.
Thank you very much for this “masterpiece” if I can call it like this, I really really appreciate it
matteo messina denaro
@@antropix5387 💀💀💀💀💀💀
I'm a Ladin speaker and over here we try to preserve the Ladin language by speaking it to our children and we even learn Ladin at school. It's extremely uncommon that a child doesn't know Ladin.
Sometimes it happens that an italian couple transfers here, have a child and they speak Italian to it, but despite that, they still learn about Ladin from friends and from school.
I'd wish that the local institute made more with Ladin, like dubbing movies, translating commonly played games (e.g. Minecraft), but they actually don't do much (from what I can tell at least).
Nice video, really appreciated!
It’s great to here how Ladin is thriving relative to other languages in Italy, the fact it’s taught in schools is a great advantage. Thank you for your comment!
I smiled when I read "... an italian couple transfers here.." :)
What might not be understood is that languages such as Ladin are what I call domestic languages. They are suitable for talking about domestic topics - about the minutiae of daily existence but are unsuitable for other matters.
An example of such a language is Kurdish. It's very suitable for domestic matters but as soon as Kurdish speakers go beyond the boundaries of the home and family they turn to Arabic.
I would imagine that the same applies to Ladin, if not to the majority of the numerous languages listed for Italy.
To some extent even Italian is becoming something of a domestic language. It cannot match the creativity of the vast English-speaking universe and the result is the flood of words entering from the English language. To a much less extent, still also from French.
There is a view that any language spoken by fewer than 90m (!) speakers is under long term threat.
@@alanwhiplington5504 Not sure what you're talking about, Ladin is a language just like any other. It's not like you can't suddenly speak about science in Ladin and need to switch to German, Italian or English. In the worst of cases, you can use loanwords from other languages if you don't know the specific word in ladin (which is more a skill issue of the speaker, and not a problem related to the language itself) without switching language entirely.
I work as an electrician and it's really common that I need to explain some concepts to clients or other workers (and I obviously do it in Ladin if the other person also speaks it, without huge problems).
Also, just wondering, what languages do you speak?
I know someone who mods Minecraft. I'll have him teach it to me and make a Ladin mod. Thanks for making a very bored person's life have a little meaning. Mama, I'm preserving languages now!
Thank you for this video.
I'm Italian and I noticed something worth mentioning. The generation of my great-grandparent spoke dialects a lot. Basically all of the time. The generation of my grandparents "learned" Italian at school. The generation of my parents nearly forgot the dialects. And now my generation (I'm 18) is adding into the language a lot of English words.
That's a phenomenon so widespread that numerous English words are already present in newer Italian dictionaries. Some words are italicized ("postare" from "to post", "skippare" from "to skip", "buggare" from "to bug", "spoilerare" from "to spoil" ecc.) but many are kept the same (account, smartphone, selfie, chat, glitch, hacker, link, loop, ecc.)
Please note how, unsurprisingly, all these words come in one way or another from the internet.
Language is fluid and I think that's good. However, it's true that globalization is killing linguistic diversity. That's a shame, but I can't help but fantasize about a future in which the majority of the world will talk the same one language. And it probably won't be that far from English.
When I play videogames I don't usually say words like "uccidere, nascere, regalare" I usually say "killare, spawnare, givvare". I use the word "droppare" from "to drop" everytime instead of the italian version "buttare" because it can mean something else
@@Loresette yeah, the majority of terms have a corresponding word in Italian, but some don't. I usually prefer speaking "pure" Italian, and yet, there isn't really a way I can avoid use "droppare" in a videogame, because "buttare" or "lasciare" aren't quite the same thing.
It's curious how yeah, every language has its intraducibile terms, but since Italian (and not Italian alone) is borrowing terms from the English language, and still keeping its own intraducibile words, it is somehow becoming more... richer than English? It'll be interesting observing what the future of speech will have in store for us.
Prendere parole straniere e italianizzarle non è necessariamente un male. L'italiano già di per sè ha tante parole germaniche, arabe, greche, spagnole, francesi...
Un termine nuovo può ampliare le sfumature che una lingua può esprimere. L'inglese moderno è 3 lingue in una. Una base germanica a cui si sono aggiunti il francese e il greco-latino, oltre a una rifinitura da altre fonti. È chiamato sempre inglese ma è già molto diverso da quello di un millennio fa. Quello che però riformerei in italiano è smetterla di importare senza alcun adattamento. Se la parola "bistecca" viene dall'inglese "beef steak", perchè smartphone, software, hardware, ecc. non potrebbero diventare smarfon, sofuer, arduer, ecc.?
Ho visto cose del genere in spagnolo e portoghese con altri termini mentre in italiano i media inventano perfino anglismi inesistenti e sgrammaticati che non significano niente appena varchi il confine. Notate che gli adattamenti che ho proposto non terminano in vocale perchè non è necessario che tutte le parole italiane lo facciano, sennò la lingua si appesantisce nello scorrimento. Però rispettare l'ortografia italiana che è la più semplice tra quelle occidentali dovrebbe essere il minimo. Una volta entravano tanti francesismi e oggi molti li sanno pronunciare ma non scrivere perché non tutti furono riformati all'italiana. Altri termini stranieri invece li tradurrei ma con creatività. Non servono traduzioni troppo letterali che portano a termini o perifrasi lunghe e scomode. Ad esempio "cloud computing" può diventare "nuvomatica" (nuvola + informatica), "weekend" può diventare "fimana" (da "fine settimana" che è troppo lungo per competere con la versione inglese) così come in spagnolo si usa "finde" da "fin de semana".
Insomma, con inventiva ci si può sbizzarrire. L'élite politica e giornalistica di questo Paese è però ridicola. I giornalisti di una volta scolpivano la lingua inventando parole ed espressioni che il popolo assorbiva. Oggi invece il servilismo linguistico è spacciato per modernità.
@@vlc-cosplayer Io ho sempre detto "stampante". Mi devo esser perso la novità "printer". Detto ciò, i calchi linguistici sono sempre esistiti. Le lingue si modellano anche sugli adattamenti alla propria ortografia e fonetica. Oggi nessuno si accorge che "implementare, supportare e trincare" sono calchi. C'è però un'altra questione da affrontare. La mente tende all'economicità del linguaggio. Tra due opzioni possibili, tenderemo sempre a preferire quella che impiega meno sillabe. Non puoi battere i monosillabi stranieri con parole quadrisillabiche o usando due parole al posto di una. Servono alternative comode che portino il parlante verso un naturale utilizzo. "Fine settimana" perde contro "weekend". In spagnolo però "finde" compete perché è altrettanto rapido. Non parleremo mai a monosillabi come l'anglofonia ma non si possono neanche proporre alternative che il pensiero scarterebbe per la voglia di andare dritto al punto.
@@vlc-cosplayer meh, preservare le lingue è diverso dall'opporsi alla loro naturale evoluzione, quello che sta succedendo con i dialetti è sbagliatissimo, siccome c'è un'opposizione istituzionale e un'innaturale opposizione culturale, ma l'integrazione della lingua con termini stranieri per indicare concetti che non erano previsti non ha niente di male.
"Stampare" stato adottato dal germanico ad un certo punto.
Per quanto si voglia far sembrare che sia così, non siamo alla fine della storia.
Wow man, this video is remarkable. I live in Piedmont, but i am 80km from Milan. To my nephew, i speak italian and Piedmont dialect (from my area). His dad speaks Italian and Sicilian (from his area) to him, his mom speaks Italian and English. The thing is that this little man answers in the same language of the question ( Piedmont dialect, Sicilian, English and Italiano ). That's amazing.
i can only say, from venician, that dialects are a blessing, they make u feel more patriotic toward your region, and they can help u to express better with people from your region
I'm from Italy (Sicily)
it's nice to see how other country people study our language 😊🇮🇹
Im from Italy too,and i agree with you
“Italy”
@@joshualuz8200 what?
@@joshualuz8200 Hi German
I’m Italian and most of the things you said are true, but dialects aren’t spoken in a whole region (I’m from Lombardy so I’m gonna talk about what I know) like people from Bergamo speak a whole different dialect compared to people from Milan or Lodi, almost every big city has its dialect and to my opinion, even if it should be preserved it isn’t useful nowadays to talk with people, I usually speak dialect with my grandmother but normally I use Italian, it’s simpler and way more understandable by everyone, sometimes I use words from dialect while speaking Italian but I don’t find it too much useful nowadays (really it’s spoken like in a 20km radius and than it changes to a different one)
Can relate, it's not really useful to speak a Lombard dialect when you travel to the next little village and can only decipher about half of what they say... You drive 20 minutes to another province and you can't understand a single word
They're not wholly different, that's a myth. There are studies showing, with dialectometry, that Milan and Bergamo speaks very similar dialect. If we can call /y/ shifting to /ø/, /i/ to /e/ (and that's not true for every bergamasco dialect) and some Venetian words... Italian changes at every ASL 😀
@@darilmarra4383 if you can't speak it properly. Clearly if you have a basic level in your own dialect and you don't speak that often you'll have a bad time understanding different dialects. That happens with every language: Irish dialects of English are quite hard to understand for students or L2 which don't use English often.
Dai figa saran pure diversi ma io da comasco capisco abbastanza i dialetti lombardi, anche se non ho mai parlato nemmeno il mio
Questa che dici è una cazzata, il vocabolario è uguale la grammatica pure, se cambia leggermente la pronuncia pur sempre è la stessa lingua
I don't know if It Is the same outside Italy but here we can choose whether to study religion at school or a bunch of alternatives, and I think the local language should be one of them, It would probably be the most useful too in my opinion.
I’m Italian (from north Sardinia), I watched a lot of videos like this, and this is the first correct video I saw about different languages in Italy 🇮🇹❣️
This is like...the best video made on this topic that I've ever seen, so much so that I'm thinking of showing it to my students here in Australia. Thank you 💖
So as an Italian myself (Friulan) I will say that I speak Italian instead of Friulan not because I consider it "inferior" but because It's more handy....everybody know exactly what you mean etc.....I can speak a bit of my dialect because I assimilated it mainly listening my grandparents speaking. When you go from a region to another people usually speak Italian with each other and you may recognize their origin from their accents.Probably in the next 50-100 years my dialect will be dead, that's kinda sad but also inevitable
senza contare che il friulano è incredibilmente diverso dall'italiano rispetto ad altri dialetti della regione. Probabilmente se senti parlare un Triestino o un Goriziano in dialetto risci a capire il 70% di quello che dice. Io del Friulano davvero non capisco niente.
@@mence5992 in effetti il veneto è sosprende tempo vicino all'italiano, se pensiamo che è diviso da esso dalle lingue gallo-italiche e confina con quelle retoromanze che sono, tutte, ben diverse dalla lingua di Dante.
fantastic video btw. came here after watching your lilting video. I’m not a film enthusiast by any means but I really admire your production quality, sound quality (microphone isn’t picking up weird crap!), etc. I hope your channel gets real big you deserve it for the amount of work you’ve put in, imo.
Italian here, I'm speechless to see someone so interested in our languages/dialects. I personally speak Italian, "pavese' (dialect from Pavia, small city in the Lombardia region) and English. I always thought that pavese (my dialect) was 100% useless and In some ways it is, I'm 31, I can safely say that over 90% of my friends can't speak the dialect at all, i was lucky enough to learn it from my grandparents and my father (I also learned a bit of sicilian from my mother and my other grandparents but i can't really speak it) most of the people in the city itself don't speak the dialect anymore, only those in the small towns and villages on the countryside do. But I remember that when I was a kid in elementary school they did teach us the dialect a bit, we had to read and translate poems in our dialect and that was amazing, nowadays nobody does that, not a single school in the whole city. Anyway, I'm really happy that I found this video, it's amazing to see people from other counties so interested in our languages/dialects.
Fun fact about my city that also applies to a lot of cities in the whole of Italia, we speak 2 distinct dialects here depending on wich side of the city we grow up (the city is split in half by a river) potentially speaking, the amount of dialect in the whole country is amongst the largest you can can find in any country in the wolrd wich is one of the many reasons why I love my country, we have a saying that I love that reflects perfectly the many differences we have here (bot culturally and linguistically) "paese che vai, persone che trovi" wich means "for every town you visit you'll find different people" (not a literal translation obviously)
you must be one of few Italian who speak English
: )
@@bartsimpson8616 I'm sorry to correct you but in italy you must study english, you start study it at age of 6 or sometimes even before and you continue ti study untill yuoi end your scolastic career at about 20 years old and than if you go to university you continue studying it, it isn't our first lenguage so is obvious that we can make a few mistakes but about every italian that went to school in the last 35-40 years know at least basic english
@bart simpson there are lots of people here actually- but only some ( like me :> ) speak it correctlyand know more grammar and terms to use in sentences and texts :P
@@kappa1463 che ci vuoi fare purtroppo è questa la nostra reputazione per via di centinaia di show/film/giochi dove siamo stereotipati al massimo e non si tratta neanche di una cosa vecchia perchè in alcune media recenti è ancora cosi.
Saluti dalla Lomellina :)
My mother speaks Milanese and my father speaks Molfettese. When you compare them, they are so incredibly different despite being developed in the same country.
Yoooo I'm from Molfetta
Love ur father c:
Wow, I'm italian (from Trieste), and I'm quite impressed by your video. It's reeeeeeeally precise and has focused on the real point: "dialects" (as we name them) are part of our heritage. Great video, see ya soon (cocolo video, se vedemo mulon!)
i’m italian and, i have to say, i am impressed by this video for how good you got the point. You said only things that i already knew but it was amazing seeing how well you understood it all. I am very impressed, great work
I think a distinction must be made between northern and southern languages: while in the north the regional languages are rapidly fading, in the south they are generally speaking alive and well. Neapolitan for example is still developing new slang, and it's used a lot in popular forms of art such as music, theater and cinema. It is true though that, particularly in the past, in middle class households parents would prevent their children from speaking the "dialect" as it was thought that this would affect their ability to switch to proper italian when the context required so. I, a native speaker of Italian and Neapolitan, remember my parents used to say this a lot to me when I was young: "speak properly" which meant "don't use neapolitan". Of course, this in most cases wouldn't work: it is almost impossible not to pick it up, even from the same parents that would tell you to always speak proper italian, as everybody are virtually in a situation of dyglossia, and luckily so, since it is not true that people grow up incapable of speaking proper italian as well.
A big reason for that may be that Northern Italy has attracted a huge number of internal migrants during the last centuries: you can't use your dialect if a considerable percentage of the people around you can't speak it, and northern dialects, being stigmatized and replaced by Italian in all of the mass-media, never had the strength to attract migrants into learning them. They're only lively in rural areas that never managed to attract migrants.
My regional language, Romagnol, is at least witnessing a small revival, but it's mainly confined to restaurant and festival names, fixed expressions and small poetry festivals. It's still not considered "cool" to make a nationally-relevant pop song or a tv series in Romagnol, as happens with Neapolitan or Roman. Romagnol, like most other languages from the north, is also too different from Italian to easily mix the two languages in everyday speech.
@@LucaPasini2 I agree. These are the main two reasons why northern regional languages faded: on the one hand, they are generally speaking too different from standard italian, unlike southern languages that belong to the same branch of romance languages; on the other hand, internal migration as you said.
@@TheMyth92 i would add thay the northern dialect don't have the privilege of a big literature and music culture there's for dialects like Neapolitan or Sicilian or for acting like for roman
So we don't have any positive rappresantion and we youngs have even less reasons to want to learn it
As a Neapolitan I can confirm, teenagers speak more neapolitan among each other than italian, and a lot of songs, even TV series are made in neapolitan. Southern dialects are still very alive.
Thank you for this video. I come from the Marches (the light blue!) and I confirm that, even in this area, under the name of "Central Italian dialects" hundreds of variations exist, from a village to another. And being now in Veneto, I confirm having to learn another language !
Ciao
As an Italian (I'm from Vicenza) I must say this video is very accurate (also the "come xéla" part), and I recognize you the fact that you made a distinction between all Venetian dialects (in fact, if you listen to the Western Venetian, it has some differences with the Central or the Eastern)
Im from Germany learning Italian and fell for Sicily (particolamente Palermo, ci sono solo le arancine e basta!) The people are just so nice and beautiful, the history is rich, the food is buonissimo and the cultures that have intertwined there… it’s simply amazing and I hate that Sicilian is not considered its own language but a mere dialect, yet Sardinian is. (Nothing against Sardinian though)
Also maybe because Im from the East of Germany I can relate to being stereotyped as less educated, speaking an awful dialect, working a low paid job or being more of a „rural mindset“ if you get my drift, which is why I may also connect to Sicilians (and southern Italians in general) more in that way. But yeah I can attest that although I really love the Sicilian and Italian languages both, I am not holding the same attitude towards my native language. I dare not speak in a dialect (because Im aware of the association) and Im embarrassed when people do, and I try to speak as standard German as possible. BUT I do must say this attitude has changed since Ive been studying linguistics. I grew up in Saxony but my family is from Brandenburg/Berlin, so at home I grew up with a Brandenburgihian/Old-Berliner dialect and was outside of home surrounded by the Saxonian dialect (considered the worst dialect). But now since I moved to Berlin I really leaned a lot into my family‘s dialect and I absolutely love it (so much that I even can’t comprehend that people wouldnt like that dialect haha) I dont care what people say, when someone speaks Brandenburghian/Berliner to me, that‘s just home. (But apart from that I still dont like hearing other German dialects, especially Saxonian, though. Except for the Viennan dialect. That is so beautiful)
I have some knowledge of standard German but speak mostly Anglo/Saxon
I feel it! Hugs from Italy, even if from the north I still can feel and understand what you say 🙂
Probably the best video about languages in Italy, as you suggested in the end of the video most languages are protected due to the fact that they're spoken by minorities (not just lingiuistic but also ethnic) alongside the border and as such it is felt as a political need to protect them, especially in contrast with what was done during the fascist regime where even in the recently conquered Istria and Dalmatia Italian was the only permitted language; so much so that linguistic minorities are protected by the 6th article of the Costitution of Italy (regarded as one of the best, it might be worth a look). But probably more should be done to protect every language. Also remember that big parts of Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli-Venezia Giulia came to be part of Italy only after the Great War so much later than 1861 year in which even Rome wasn't part of Italy.
I think the inner migration from south to north has had a great role in the lost of non official languages, as evrything got more mixed, for example you can here people speaking somewhat of Venetian but with a Neapolitan accent because they grew up in Veneto but their parents are neapolitans.
From Venice: ciao vecio ;)
i remember when i was very little i was used to speak in my dialect but i was always being corrected by my teachers who used to tell me "you cant say it" instead of "it's not italian" and maybe thats why i've always felt ashamed and stopped speaking my dialect gradually. but then during the time i was in middle school i started to find all these diversities so intriguing, i wanted to learn more of my local language that i was always so afraid to speak
Great video! I'm Italian from Sardinia, and even if Sardinian is technically recognized as a language, and not a dialect, it is still not preserved at all. Because of its status Sardinian should be taught by law, but it isn't, there's a lot of neglect from the government and as of now very few people speak it fluently (also people could not agree on which Sardinian was more "correct", the southern or the northern, which lead to a lot of Sardinians not accepting the official version) because of that the Langue of my people is dying. I'm saying this because even if, yes, a language is officially recognized, it sadly doesn't guarantee its safety
Because even Sardinian has differents dialects, we constantly argue about what is to be considered "proper" main language (Logudoro? Limba Sarda Comuna?). Even though I think the best version is the Baroniese. A disclaimer is needed to provide some funny contest about the last phrase, which was intended to be ironic. Failure to specify this could result in civil war in my beloved land XD. For our foreign friends: you have to be Italian to understand how my people (Sardinians) can be a little... touchy for basically everything, especially when you talk about our language. Damn, i even feel almost offended to be not included as endangered species in this video.
Ma che dici! Tutti parlano il sardo in Sardegna
@@ita-bel704ma non è vero! A sassari parlano sassarese e non capiscono il logudorese (zona che dista pochi km) Tutta la sardegna è così, ognuno parla la sua versione di "sardo'.
@@ita-bel704 No, la gran parte della popolazione parla le due principali varianti del sardo: logudorese al centro nord e campidanese al sud. Sassare e Gallurese, all'estremo nord, sono dialetti di derivazione corsa, che a sua volta è una lingua che deriva dal toscano antico. Infine ad Alghero si parla catalano e a Carloforte il ligure.
@@nbwaf continuate a scrivermi di varianti ma il mio ragionamento non cambia, qualunque variante sia parlata nella sua specifica zona anche i bambini la parlano quindi ( per me ) non c'è nessun pericolo di perdere la nostra lingua in favore dell'italiano.
Sicilian here! We don't understand each other either, trust me. Also, great video! I always thought Sicilian was a dialect which then graduated as a full fledged language, but I was evidently wrong. Bravo!
Sicilian was the very first "italian" literary language with the Scuola Siciliana, centuries before fiorentino became the standard!
@@sieben8724 In in Sicily they have their own regional dialects. I played Sicilian sung sung by Giuseppe Di Stefano (who's from the Catania region) to my Palermo parents who couldn't understand the words he was singing.
Good Lord, I love to listen to all these stories. Very interesting and informative.
@@modestacattaruzza7400 :D
As an Italian born and raised in Milan, I have to thank you! This was wonderfully written and executed! Thank you so much!
I really liked this video. I’m italian and what you said is 100% true. One of the things I totally love about my country is the amount of dialects you can find. This is a really complex topic, and I hope that this diversity remains
Ad an Italian myself I appreciated that an English person got interested by the Italian languages and tried to explain them to other English people❤
As an italian with a degree in foreign languages I must agree all langues have the same right to exist.
Extremely interesting video and a lot more informed than most italian made video on this matter. Thanks!
Thank you!
Thank you so much for this, I don't know why you wanted to make this, but it's super well informed, (I swear most videos on this get something wrong, this was a refresher) and I stand with you absolutely. The Stigma IS real, I live in Sicily, and my mother never taught me Sicilian, she actually always tried to NOT have me learn it, always on the basis that if I were to slip up and talk Sicilian when I shouldn't have to, that I'd get deemed ignorant and/or stupid. I thus never learned Sicilian, and I can't speak it. I can understand most of it, as I've heard it my whole life, but I to this day have no idea how to speak proper Sicilian. I wish I could learn, being a Language Nerd is so cool when I notice things about my own language, which for its stigma does not have common or even any documentation. The actual Sicilian Language is also influenced by Standardized Italian, so a lot of words are near extinction. I hope I can do something to keep the tradition alive. Again, Thank you lots for the amazing video. I hope the diversity of this country can become a point of pride to unify the people of this place and forget the stigmas and prejudice. Thank you again. As a Language Nerd, but as an Italian first and foremost.
Hello there! I just wanted to clarify that no matter where you live in Alto Adige (South Tyrol), you will learn Italian. The german schools all teach Italian (as well as standardized german) because ultimately we are part of Italy and therefore should also be able to speak it. Some people just find it hard to learn because they only speak german, but that doesn't mean that it isn't taught in schools. Thank you so much for this video I love seeing people interested in our country
Endlich jemand fe Südtirol gfunden🥲😂
@@ailerallera2976 schaugn olle gleichzeitig is gleiche video oder wos😂
@@sgteagle423 hahhaha logo😂👌
My mind was blown when I said ANDIAMO and my Dad (whos from a small rural village near Foggia) said YAMACIN.
No
Hey said
Iamasenn'
"Andiamocene"
@@gabrieleguerrisi4335 It depends from the dialect. In neapolitan It is "jammucenne"
Si rici AMUNINNDI re me patti :P
My Roman ex-wife taught me to say annamo
In my Piedmontese would be something likw "'nduma "🤣
As a person from Southtyrol I agree on what you say. The fact that you wrote down "German" in quotes represents that it is not the usual german language but a dialect that originates from austria. You can hear differences even in different parts of Southtyrol. But what makes it so special is that the southern part of this country gets more mixed with italian.
At the same time, every town has its own italian dialect again.
Resulting in a combination of austrian dialect phrases with italian synonyms of their town.
Of course, talking with italians is for many actually difficult as many still refuse to learn this language.
In any case Southtyrol is home to 3 language groups. Austrian Dialect(German), Italian and Ladin.
Austrian-bavarese it's a separate language from german, why do you call it german?
I've never understood this custom of the Germanic peoples, even if you don't understand each other, call everything German.
@@ltubabbo529 I agree. But yeah this is exactly the point... nowadays if other similar languages are heard everyone connects it immediately with the standard German...
Hence the reason I say that so no discussion will occur. Otherwise, as we all know the web, one will always want to be right over the other
@@michaelhorwarter374 Ahahahah there is no danger with me! Anyway thanks for the answer, even if it remains a strange custom
I'm Italian, from Friuli. My parents chose to only speak Friulian with me, even when we were not living where Friulian is spoken, and I'm so glad they did: even if Italian and Friulian are very similar languages, growing up "bilingual" has only advantages imho. It's easier to dissociate words from objects and not to introduce idiosyncrasies of one laguage into the other.
As for Italian, I learnt it thanks to schooling and television.
Forum julii will need a Indipendent neutral state. ❤
Hi I live in Canada and my parents were from Orcenico Superiore (small village outside of Pordenone). My parents also spoke Friulan to my sister and I, we still speak it now. My parents/we had many friends here in Canada who were also from Friuli around the same area as my parents and I'm also very glad we could all speak together. We also learned Italian which is very close as you say. We learned it mostly from attending weddings and parties at our local Italian Club and watching Italian movies. When at the Club everyone just slipped into Italian effortlessly, but you would still be able to hear all the differnt dialects around the hall, Roman, Calabrese, Siciliano, Genoese, Bergamese, it was wonderful!😁
The regional language map that you used is very detailed but, as an Italian, i think that all the languages and dialects that are spoken in italy are impossible to map because, in my experience, the language slightly change even between two bordering towns.
I very enjoyed this video by the way because i never thought that there were non-italian people who care about this. Thank you ❤️
Indeed, it's a "continuum" of similar dialects almost everywhere in Italy, except perhaps for that red line (in the video map), i.e. the boundary between Gallo-Italic and Italo-Dalmatian, where the change is pretty heavy in just a few miles.
Italian from Friuli here and I can say your video is 100% accurate. I personally speak one of the many Venetian dialects and also Friulian (apart from Italian and British and American English) and this because as a kid I'd hear my parents and grandparents speak in such languages, and so in the end basically I ended up absorbing them
Dimmi se ho ragione, ma avendo parenti in Friuli ho notato il dialetto ha qualcosa sia di slavo che di spagnolo. Non posso fare altro che chiedermi se magari le regioni "marittime" (nel caso del Friuli intendo per esempio da Trieste) non abbiano delle influenze da tutto il Mediterraneo, appunto perché mi spiego le influenze slave ma non quelle spagnole. Per indicazione, i miei parenti sono vicino alla Carnia
@@martinap863 Allora, l'influenza slava c'è di sicuro, poi tra l'altro in Carnia, vicino al confine aggiungono un po' di austriaco. Riguardo all'influenza dello spagnolo non so niente, però c'è da dire che in effetti qualcosa di simile si nota. Io sono, diciamo, più o meno del nord-ovest del Friuli, per cui capita che i dialetti siano anche influenzati dal veneto
@@sebastianiodice3394in Friuli Venezia Giulia si parlano quattro lingue: italiano, friulano, tedesco e sloveno.
Poi ci sono vari dialetti.
I'm watching this as an Italian(from Tuscany) I love seeing people learning about my country, this is stuff that's so deep rooted in my daily life, I don't even pay attention to it
It is kinda sad how linguistic uniformity was enforced in Europe as part of the nation building process and I feel like to some degree it might be starting to cause trouble even for those languages that became national languages since they're starting to get dominated by the larger international languages like English. In the same process a lot of culture was erased and instead a copy pasted idea of national culture was forced on everyone which in many situations just ended up killing the culture all together, I don't think anyone cared about these things once it just became an empty symbol of nationalism. Fundamentally culture is stuff people do to have fun and it ceased to be fun when it stopped being local and became national.
I mean, the romans made half of Europe speak Latin. Even in other places like Northern Africa.
Yet, even after Latin became spoken from London to Alexandria (not exactly but whatever), it splintered organically and mixed with, or influenced, the cultures that came to dominate areas of the old empire.
So there is no rule, just people passing.
Italy have always been invaded and influenced by many different people and cultures.
Germans, Greeks, Arabs, Celts, Slavs, Franks, Etruscans and on and on..
Plus the italics peoples of course.
It looks like a non-problem.
The main difference is that today we can communicate with many more strangers. Now we can use the phone or social medias and communicate in yet another language (if you speak more than one) to people from other parts of the world.
The scale is different
The evolution continue
I’m bad at English
But I’m chilling
This video is so accurate! I was born in the Veneto region and I was taught by my dialect-speaking grandparents not to speak dialect because "it's not proper", so I never learned. I've now lived in several northern italian regions and while I do mostly understand the dialects the people around me speak, I can't speak them myself because I was taught never to speak dialect. Speaking dialect at school is also discouraged as it's seen as "boorish" and ignorant, as if speaking dialect makes you "dumb" while speaking italian makes you "smart"; for example if a kid while speaking italian uses a verb wrong just because that's how that verb is used in the dialect they're used to, they're treated like an ignorant donkey and mocked for it. this is the mentality that's gradually leading to our "dialects"/"languages" becoming more and more endangered...
Found your channel after the lilting video (which was funny, informative, and entertaining) :D I'm a writer and I often look for information about languages, so it was really helpful! I don't actually have any story to use it in, but I might in the future XD Speaking of Latin, I recently found out about this undeciphered codex called the Voynich Manuscript. If you haven't heard of it, you might find it interesting :)
Hallo! Person from the Venice area here. The video is very well done and I'm actually gonna use it to explain the linguistical situation here in Italy to international friends. Just one curiosity: in Veneto we never refer to "western veneto" " southern veneto" etc... When we talk about language. We usually locate the dialect indicating the city. In Venice area alone there are at least 4 major variations of Veneto: margherotto (from Marghera), veneziano (the OG from Venice), Mestrino (from mestre) and chioggiotto (from Chioggia. This one is almost literally a separate language). We often say things like: "ahhh, ma ti xe da belun?" (Ah, so you're from Belluno) when we identify the origin of the person based on the variation of Veneto they are speaking, or on the accent that they use for standard Italian. In Veneto mountains then, there are valleys where they have their own specific Veneto.
Long live Veneto language! Let's not make these languages die, they are beautiful and immensely rich
Uh, another very interesting thing: in Brasil there are people speaking Talian, wich basically is Veneto, with Portuguese, piemontese, German and other eastern Europe influence. So cool to find my regional language spoken in another continent!
FYI: modern venetian is a mixture of venetian language, developed in the venetian empire + Spanish (cuz we were dominated by them for a while) + some German (cuz we were under Austria for a while)
Veneto region has NEVER been conquered by anyone but, in late 1800, JUST for a couple decades by Austria. Let's say has never been under anyone then.
In fact it's always been an indipendent country unlike many other italian ones.
Also Veneto is still spoken in its former territories of Istria Dalmazia and Greek Islands. Unlike any other italian language, Veneto is spoken abroad by its former Venetian citizens.
Hello! I'm Italian from Naples, thank you for this video! I had just one thing to say: neapolitan is spoken just in Naples and in some towns around the city 😀 even in the Campania region itself exist a lot of other dialects, more than one for every province... So imagine from region to region the number of dialects spoken 🥲 Molise, Basilicata ect have different dialects. Maybe similar to neapolitan, but still different ♥️
Thank you for your comment. The reason the whole south of Italy is colored the same is because we say that they speak one language with many dialects. For convenience, we call this language Neapolitan. Obviously this is confusing because Neapolitan is what many Italians would call the specific dialect of Neapolitan that is spoken around Naples. Other people call this language other things; some people call it Neapolitan-Calabrese, and some call it Continental-Southern-Italian. I think the name Neapolitan works well because of the history of the region. The reason I don’t have Molisano, Pugliese, Abruzzese, etc. on the map is because it is not a map of the dialects of Italy, it is a map of the languages of Italy. We say that Molisano, Pugliese, and Abruzzese are all dialects of this language called “Neapolitan-Calabrese” or just “Neapolitan”. I hope that helps with the confusion, thank you again for commenting.
It’s funny to see how many Italians in the comments refer to their local language as dialect. I am a native Tuscan speaker and as we’re told in school our language is where Italian comes from, I used to speak Tuscan with people from other regions. Only after I realised it wasn’t always clear for others to understand what I was saying. Other Italians told me how parents or grandparents didn’t speak the local language with them, not to “spoil” the nice Italian they were learning in school. Like Sardinian, that was perceived as a shepherds language in the mainland…nowadays we should teach local languages in school. All languages are important!
Wow, I am a guy born in Veneto and living in Veneto and this video is really accurate. Fun fact: in my living area there are many variations of venetian dialects that differ from town to town, or even from a side to another from the river Piave. Even the Dialect spoken in Venezia is really different from for example, the Treviso dialect.
All Europe has this situation mainly because of our story. Great video btw
I am from Canada and still can speak in the Trevisano dialect! I learned it from my Trevisano parents!
Interesting video! I'm neapolitan, so I'd like to add a few words. It's important to note that, as you said, when Italy was first unified, very few people only from higher classes knew italian. That is until television became more common. That's when specific TV shows were born with the sole purpose to teach italian to the common illiterate people (dialects and other languages in Italy are spoken, rarely written). It was at that point that the idea that Italian is a superior language was born. My dad came from a cultured family, and when he was a child, he was prohibited by his parents to speak neapolitan, as the idea was born that it was a language only for illiterate country people. Still, when he was out with his friends and out in the world in general, he learned it and is now passing it on to me and my brother. While nowadays many neapolitan words have become disused or have been completely lost, I think neapolitan is partly leaving behind it's negative stereotypes, also thanks to many neapolitan icons in the past and present who have shown Italians the beautiful culture of our area and its language!
When i was in primary school, we had to do a play at the end of every year. One year, the play was partly in Ligurian, and the play was even about the generational divide between the older, rural population (that spoke Ligurian) and the younger (that only spoke italian). We had to learn a bit of Ligurian for it! When i asked my father to teach me, he told me that it wasn't worth it, that no one taught him well and that i would only make a fool of myself to the older folks in our area. It makes me sad that these languages are slowly dying. There are even old songs from before WWI that we learn in school but that's the only way we learn them by now. Italy's population is apparently 24% of people over 65 years old, yet as they slowly pass, they teach less and less about the old languages in favour of "the most useful one".
Very good video!
I assume it was one of Gilberto Govi's classics, right? Has to be :)
Fellow Ligurian-born here (Ponente), and yeah Govi's plays (which are played MOSTLY in Italian, strongly accented and with a lot of Ligurian-isms when performed for an Italian speaking audience) often feature at least one character who (generally because they became rich recently) insists on "speaking proper Italian", exaggerating the pronunciation and making gross mistakes (because they, too, are NOT Italian speakers and are only affecting it to sound important).
Hi, I'm from Venice (Veneto), my boyfriend is from Udine (Friuli). We feel this a lot. Friulano is recognised as a language and is also thought at school, but he always complained that the teacher was from southern italy, and so wasn't really able to teach the language properly. But to the point of the video: we speak to each other in italian, I don't have much of an accent, he does more, but at first we really had trouble understanding each other sometimes because there were lots of linguistical barriers, things that I didn't even know were dialect or that I used differently. Know after 5 years together we learned to understand each other and what is dialect and what is italian, teaching also each other our languages. It's incredible the level of difficulty in this, especially because our region are near, it's just one hour travel, and Friuli was also under Venetian government for centuries, but nonetheless the languages are so different
Addirittura tra Veneto e friulano non vi capivate
I feel this a lot. Io sono piemontese (ma della zona in rosa nel video, dove il dialetto è sotto il lombardo), quando vado a trovare i cugini di Udine faccio una fatica boia a capire quando parlano tra di loro (strettissimo poi) e soprattutto mi dimentico di lasciare a casa il mio dialetto, anche se qualcosina lo hanno imparato da nostra nonna. Però "vonde" lo uso tutti i giorni, anche a casa, quando mi versano l'acqua nel bicchiere
I live in Trieste and speak Triestino. Everyone speaks it. When you go to a shop or a restaurant the shop assistants or the waiters speak to you in Triestino and the Italian outsiders are a bit shocked by this haha it differs from the Veneto dialect because it has its own peculiarities and there are German words (because of the influence Austro-Hungary had) and Slovenian words, as there has always been a Slovenian minority in Trieste.
i am Danish and have norwegian family, so i understand norwegian, even some of the most obscure dialects. i have gone to school in Sweden and can speak swedish. i went to a school near Umeå in northern Sweden for sport related reasons and i found that the languages of swedish and norwegian sort of merged the closer you got to the border region, and also the further north i went i Sweden. there where still grammar differences but it sounded the same to my ears.
My family is from Calabria and I've been having to learn Italian as most of what I know is actually Sicilian and not Italian. So I've been going around for a long time telling my friends that I speak English and Italian, when in truth I probably speak English and Sicilian as my native tongues. It was annoying at first to discover I basically have to learn a new language, although very similar to my native language, just so I can understand a greater part of my people.
I m Sicilian and i found your experience interesting
I would like you to write me some sentences in sicilian to see how Much i m able to understand since i grow up speaking italian only and sometimes struggle understanding some words
Se adesso parlassi della mia giornata e del fatto che il canto degli uccellini è bellissimo ma mi sta dando un mal di testa assurdo, mi capiresti?
@@thehuman805 unfortunately I'd have no clue on how to write it and wouldn't want to embarrass myself with a jumbled mess as we have only spoken the language to each other.
Here mate : a scimunitu si già parri siciliano , nun ci voli nenti a studiari l'italianu ! Sempre si non sì cosa inutili bonu sulu a sucari babbaluci
@@thehuman805 the little birds are giving you a headache
I'm form Ferrara and our dialect comes partially from French. Unfortunately here people consider their own dialect "rude", and that's why it's slowly and quietly disappearing. I don't, and instead consider it an important part of our traditions and history. That's also thanks to one of my friends that very often speaks using Ferrarese with us and it's just too fun to hear! IMO we should be more proud of it. Anyway thanks for your really accurate video about our culture! :)
I know exactly what you mean. My wife is from Cacurri, Calabria (un villagio al vicino di Crotone). I learned Italian from books and from her. When I first visited her village and spoke with the people there, non ho capito un cazzo! They were all speaking "Cacurrese", until they realised I didn't understand and changed to the Italian they'd learned at school. But they were all very proud of their language and even offered to teach me a few words. Marvellous people.
MsG
@@gionncaomhinmorpheagh4791 Wow, great! :D
Il ferrarese è stupendo, ma penso di essere l'unica persona con meno di trent'anni di mia conoscenza che lo sappia parlare fluentemente. Addirittura alcuni miei amici che abitano proprio a Ferrara non capiscono una parola se mi metto a parlarlo! Cosa si perdono a non dire "maial" all'inizio di ogni frase...
@@saturninespheres Davvero? Eh, anch'io in effetti ho solo quel mio amico che lo usa, io lo so abbastanza, ma non perfettamente. Ho trovato un dizionario online :D tu sei della zona?
This point has already been reached. The last generation to use dialect in my family was my grandfather's. My parents only say a few words, and I only understand but not speak at all. The thing is my family moved a few times (Liguria, Lombardia, Veneto) so for us it doesn't makes sense to speak a dialect that nobody speak around us. And does make even less sense to learn the local dialect when you can use just italian.
6:40 it's nice to see that italy has more rescect for occitan than france does.
Says a lot about france
To know how french government is, just ask to italian
It is basically the same thing for italian languages.
Venetian is considered a language by the Brazilian government (there are small communities of Venetian speakers there) but isn't by the Italian government.
You should mention the internal immigration that is present in Italy. People from South go to North, so the only way to understand each other is to speak Iitalian. That may be a reason why in northern part of Italy dialects are dying and why in the South dialects still have much more importance.
Hi!I'm from vicenza veneto. And I can speak English Italian and venetian and in school we study French.
Teachers encourage us to speak Italian at school,but at home I speak venetian.
Love from veneto ❤🇮🇹
There are literally words and pronunciations that change between the city I live in (6 000 habitants) and the ones that are around me, you don't even know how much confusing and complex learning dialects can get. There are just some unique words we have, and there is not any "official Italian" counterpart to explain the same concept in just a single word.
I live in the countryside of Romagna, it's a rural place with lots of old towns, and although people under 60 normally speak Italian, elders use dialect when talking to each other, which is so confusing sometimes I can't understand my grandma, all elders know Italian but they never use it unless they're speaking to a stranger. What's even crazier is that the words vary depending on the town you were born in. My town has 400 inhabitants and has lots of neighboring towns, but they all have their sets of words, for example.. the word "broom" or "kid" can change with just a 5 minute drive. Of course it makes sense cause what is now a 5 minute drive once was a 20 minute walk and some roads are very steep so it wasn't that easy to reach other places when cars weren't so largely available. People born after the sixties like my parents, had television, school buses and such, so from then they all speak common Italian. Most people who were born after the eighties barely even know any dialect, I don't know any I can't even understand it.
The biggest problem is that every Italian teacher forces you to abandon your dialect/language and any use of it (even verbal!) is penalised in school, it's like they don't even care about any language in the first place.
Questo perché in quanto insegnanti ti devono insegnare a scrivere e parlare italiano , non il dialetto dell' posto
Ci mancherebbe… da Roma in giù non capisco una sega servirebbe un po’ più di istruzione secondo me
non è un problema fra svegliate
@@rrccvrdosono pregiudizi quelli che sento? 👀
@@Boretheory no, sono stato a Roma, Napoli, Salento, Bari, Lecce, Palermo… e tante altre città, non capivo nulla di quello che dicessero le persone
Extremely detailed, nuanced, and well explained video! Complimenti per il lavoro!