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Foreigner with Regional Italian Accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4086 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 1 of 21 01 April 2015 at 11:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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I saw some time ago in another thread about how learners of Italian usually speak the
standard version that is usually taught in formal education although most natives do not speak like that. But I was wondering how a foreigner would go about learning a specific accent anyway, in case that after achieving a reasonable level, tried to imitate one of a Firenze, Roma, Napoli, etc. accent. This is fairly easy with Spanish for example, because it is quite clear from which country a news outlet is, or a newspaper, film, etc, and the accents are quite well-known and documented. With Italian, obviously unlike Spanish, there is only one main country where Italian is spoken as the official national language, namely Italy, and I have not seen learning materials nor certain media outlets that focus on one accent and nothing else, or is there? Of course probably most foreignerrs would not try to do this, but I usually try to pick a regional accent at some point. Edited by 1e4e6 on 01 April 2015 at 11:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4855 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 2 of 21 02 April 2015 at 4:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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You would probably either have to go to the specific region for immersion or focus on imitating a single speaker.
Nowadays though, there are plenty of people in Italy whose native language is more or less standard Italian. If you imitate the speech in unscripted or informal-language media such as TV series, unscripted talk shows, amateur podcasts, etc. then I don't think you'll sound over-formal just because you speak standard Italian. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5003 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 21 02 April 2015 at 10:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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For the "bigger" accents at least, there tend to be a lot of films set in the respective areas in which the characters mostly speak with a certain accent. For example Tuscan accents in Leonardo Pieraccioni's films; Naples/Campania in Il Postino and other films with Massimo Troisi, Reality, the first part of Ieri, Oggi, Domani, and many more; some characters in Commissario Montalbano have strong Sicilian accents; and lots of films are set in Rome and have that accent. Also there are regional radio stations and Youtube vloggers etc.
I've never had a desire to imitate a particular region's accent (even a "standard" accent is probably an impossible ambition for me), but I try to get exposure to different accents and understand them better, and films have been my main source for that. Edited by garyb on 02 April 2015 at 10:49am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4464 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 4 of 21 06 April 2015 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The Milan accent is omnipresent and not that unposh either, quite on the contrary it's linked to money and high couture. For this accent, try any Mediaset tv channel (Italia1, Rete4, Canale5 etc.).
It is becoming the new unofficial standard, just like the Estuary English in the UK. ''lingua toscana in bocca ambrosiana''. Unlike people from Naples, Venice, Genoa or even from Rome, people from Milan are never asked to tone their accent down, so even the heaviest forms of Milanese can be heard in national media (it can be heard in commercials, it is used for dubbing of cartoons into Italian etc), and unlike the heavier forms of the Roman accent it does not scream ''working class'' but ''upper middle class'' or ''high class''... In Mediaset-produced soap operas (like Le tre rose di Eva) everyone seems to be speaking with a Milan accent, even if the soap opera is set in Tuscany. Tuscan/Roman vowels (vènto, ièri, perdèndo, trèno etc.) and passato remoto seem to be regionalisms nowadays, rather than the norm. Even in Rome, people started pronouncing many words in the Milanese way: zio [dzio] rather than [tsio], iéri rather than ièri, primavéra rather primavèra etc... 
Language and Society in a Changing Italy By Arturo Tosi Edited by Medulin on 07 April 2015 at 12:00am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Donaldshimoda Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 3886 days ago 47 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Russian | Message 5 of 21 13 April 2015 at 1:26am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't agree at all with this. What you actually hear on tv is just their own accent (surely at least a little bit softened being tv hosts or actors, professionists and well educated voice-wise), so really any predominance of this "Milan accent" nor on mediaset channel neither on nationl television. You don't hear this accent anywhere outside Lombardia either. Italy is one of these countries where there's no really a "standard" accent, being those from different regions very very strong; you will recognize where people comes from in 90% of the cases. Every single region if not every single city, has its own accent (I'm not talking about dialect) so you can count up to dozen accents just in the south and so on... I'm yet to hear a foreigner talking with credible "native" Italian accent whatever it is,even audios from lots of language courses often don't sound "right", so I wouldn't care about picking up a specific accent first because it seems really few would succeed second because there's no really a need for this as long as every 100 km people here speaks differently. Edited by Donaldshimoda on 14 April 2015 at 10:07am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| xander.XVII Diglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4850 days ago 189 posts - 215 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC1 Studies: French | Message 6 of 21 15 April 2015 at 2:31am | IP Logged | |||||
I must second my fellow countryman here. I know people who have been living in Italy for 40 years, who speak perfect Italian but that they don't pass as native speakers yet. Italians has several distinct accents which are spread all over the Peninsula: it's almost immediate to recognise whether someone is from the North or generally the South (including here all the Centre and the isles), the more you get used to accents the easier it gets to recognise them. I can easily tell apart Venetian, Lombard and other Northern accent, I can easily distinguish the most famous accents in their "broad characterisation" like Roman, Sicilian, Neapolitan etc but it must be noticed that Italian varies a lot even from city to city. Where I live (Northernmost area of Italy), we tend to use the phoneme /e/, whereas 25 km northwards, people tend to use the open e. This happens within a radius of 30 km, let alone imagine an entire country. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3895 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 7 of 21 15 April 2015 at 10:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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Native Italians,
Does that mean that a native Italian who moved around within Italy in their youth doesn't have a credible native accent? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Donaldshimoda Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 3886 days ago 47 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Russian | Message 8 of 21 15 April 2015 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
didnt say that at all... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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