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Italian languages/dialects | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4435 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 1 of 6 31 March 2015 at 4:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've taken a large interest lately in learning as many of the minority languages of Italy (and to a lesser extent, Spain & France) as I can.
My problem is that I'm having trouble finding materials. For example, I'm interested in learning Piedmontese, Venetian, and Neapolitan. All of the books I've come across for Neapolitan have been from the 19th century and the only thing for Piedmontese I can find is a phrase book from Assimil. Does anyone have any idea on where to procure materials? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4929 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 2 of 6 31 March 2015 at 5:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not at my desk right now and so don't have the links, but for Piedmontese you'll want to look for: Nòste Rèis, the Diego Casino grammar, there was also a decent grammar on Libero, and there's a pretty fantastic site at Vivaldi that you spot check pronunciation, since there's not much audio out there. Alternatively, you could check my 6WC log from a couple years ago at elmepiemonteis.blogspot.com. Come to think of it, I think I included all the links there. R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4435 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 3 of 6 31 March 2015 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Awesome, thanks a ton! I've already started the Nòste Rèis course and I'm going to check out your other links when I get a chance.
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| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4929 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 4 of 6 31 March 2015 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
Nòste Rèis is actually a pretty good course, albeit with no audio. That's been my main complaint for resources - audio for Piedmontese is very difficult to come by. There's plenty of reading material though. Check Wikipedia an piemontèis too. Plenty of articles to read - some 50 thousand. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4688 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 5 of 6 31 March 2015 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Lingua Veneta has a lot of
documents in Venetian. Maybe you've seen this already, though. A lot of them are also from the 19th Century. Something new I learned on the site: the Veneto region considers Venetian to be a language, while the Italian government considers it to be a dialect. I get the impression from poking around that there is no standard Venetian spelling. Some of the documents read almost like regular Italian. Others change the vowels and accents, and use x and j, to better reflect the pronunciation (so, mèjo in Venetian is meglio in Italian). And others change the spelling so much that it looks like they are trying too hard, or letting their politics get ahead of common sense. Here's a sample from one recent document: Ma par noantri, ke zè sento e vinte e sìnkue ani ke semo in gjiro pal mondo, e gemo sempre parlà solo sto neo-véneto kome ve lo skrivo kuà, saria kome domandàr se la lìngua de Adamo e Eva la era na lìngua o kualke altra koza, parké luri no i gavea naltra maniera de parlar ke nò la soa. I could be wrong, maybe this really is the Venetian standard ... I only started poking around this morning, but it feels off to me. I'm curious to see where your explorations take you! Edited by kanewai on 31 March 2015 at 10:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5146 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 6 of 6 31 March 2015 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For Venetian you might start with these sites:
Lingua veneta: official website sponsored by the local government about the language and culture of the Veneto region (the site is also available in English). Grammar, dictionary, textbooks, videos etc. Quale lingua veneta?: an overview of the main features of the language with a comparison with standard Italian. Wikipedia. Venetan language (Vèneto) P.S. Kanewai had already posted the link to Lingua Veneta while I was browsing around.
Kanewai also brings up an interesting or, if you prefer, a pretty disheartening aspect of Venetian: there’s no such thing as a unifying standard either in the way the language is spelt but more importantly in what is considered Venetian. In fact, there are about a dozen well-established varieties of Venetian: each area has its own different dialect.  If you wonder why Venetian can be considered a language with its own dialects rather than being a dialect itself, I would suggest you read the Wikipedia article. It stresses some of the peculiarities of Venetian that are totally absent from Italian such as the "semi-analytical" verbal flexion, with a compulsory "clitic subject pronoun" (read the “Redundant subject pronouns” and following sections). Features like these, that have no parallels in Italian, are what make linguists talk about “languages” rather than “dialects”. As a native speaker, I personally am not bothered either way whether you choose to call Venetian a language or a dialect.
@Kanewai As I said above, there’s no such thing as a Venetian standard, but the text you copied feels pretty natural to me (even though it’s not my dialect). Granted, I needed to read it twice just to get the hang of decoding the written form, but that’s to be expected. The fact is that even though we* all grew up speaking only Venetian at home and started Italian almost as a second language at school, Venetian is for us a purely spoken language. We’ve never learnt to read or to write the language, because with very few exceptions (a few plays and a few poems) nothing was ever written in Venetian and everybody needed and preferred (for status reasons) to write in Italian. (*By we I mean people in our 30s, 40s, 50s etc. whose parents were also raised in the region. I’m not so sure about younger people: my generation is raising kids mainly in Italian, not Venetian). As there are several varieties of Venetian with different phonetic repertoires and no established spelling conventions since the language has always been a predominantly spoken one, linguists and dialectologists have tried to come up with some spelling standards but we’re not there yet. (And yes, you can always count on politics to muddy the water). But actually, the text you give as an example is not too bad and the conventions used seem quite intuitive and reasonable to a native speaker. EDIT: added the Postscript. Edited by Emme on 01 April 2015 at 12:27am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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