Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
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classic detective genre with those of the hard-boiled school and the sentimental novel.
The protagonist, Duca Lamberti, who works in a sadistically violent Milan, is a tough
cynic like some of Hammett’s or Chandler’s characters, but the impossibility of changing
the surrounding moral squalor infuriates rather than saddens him. A physician struck off
the register and jailed for three years for practising euthanasia, he has no ethical
attachment to his job but feels sorry for himself and for innocent victims, and
passionately hates all ‘criminals’, who for him include homosexuals, prostitutes, drug
addicts, women who undergo abortion, capelloni (hippies with long hair), corrupt lawyers
and exploiters of all kinds. His job is not to re-educate them but to punish them violently
and to expose the details of their horrible crimes. His Manichaean moralism appealed to
an urban middle-class readership which, in the late 1960s, was demanding law and order.
However, the author added other main characters who came from the society’s lower
ranks, thus expanding his readership.
Scerbanenco’s success has not been repeated in the history of the Italian detective
novel in its true form. In 1972, Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini published La donna
delta domenica (The Sunday Woman), a bestseller which, while remaining within the
convention of a classic detective novel, included references to many other literary genres,
thus becoming a detective novel of manners. The technique of mixing genres and quoting
other books has been fully explored by Umberto Eco in his 1980 international bestseller
Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), a genuinely postmodern combination of
medieval whodunnit, gothic novel, allegory and roman-à-clè.
Italian detective stories by such writers as Massimo Felisatti, Fabio Pittorru, Loriano
Macchiavelli, Nicoletta Bellotti, Luciano Anselmi, Laura Grimaldi and Luciano Secchi
have continued to find a popular audience, and in the late 1990s the novels of Giuseppe
Ferrandino and Andrea Camilleri have become bestsellers. Detective fiction has also had
its high-brow authors, in particular Carlo Emilio Gadda and Leonardo Sciascia. Gadda’s
Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (That Ugly Mess in Merulana Street) is an
experimental avantgarde text of 1946 which uses the detective genre brilliantly in order
to explore language in a way that has drawn frequent comparison with James Joyce. In
Sciascia’s Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl) (1961) and A ciascuno il suo (To
Each His Own) (1966), we also find an original utilization of the traditional structures of
detective fiction for the purposes of social commentary.
Further reading
Carloni, M. (1985) ‘Storia e geografia di un genere letterario: il romanzo poliziesco italiano
contemporaneo’ (History and Geography of a Literary Genre: The Contemporary Italian
Detective Novel), Critica letteraria 13 (46):167–87 (a useful history of the genre with
interesting exploration of the relationship between the novels and their setting).
FRANCO MANAI
Entries A–Z 241
Di Pietro, Antonio
b. 2 October 1950, Montenero di Bisaccia, Campobasso
Magistrate
A relatively unknown magistrate, Antonio Di Pietro found himself thrown abruptly into
the limelight on 17 February 1992 with the arrest of Mario Chiesa, the first move in the
anti-corruption drive codenamed Mani pulite (Clean Hands). Thereafter Di Pietro’s name
was inextricably linked to the campaign whose aim was to dismantle the system of public
corruption, subsequently nicknamed Tangentopoli (Bribesville), and which contributed
significantly to the fall of the First Republic.
Born into a peasant family in the Southern region of Molise, Di Pietro emigrated as a
young man to Germany to find work. In 1974 he enrolled in the Law Faculty in Milan,
graduating in 1979. His first employment was with the police force, and only in 1981 was
he taken on as magistrate in Bergamo. The experience was not a happy one. He was
dismissed as ‘unfit to undertake the work of a magistrate’, and reinstated only after
appeals to the Supreme Council of the Magistracy.
In 1986 he transferred to Milan and began working with a pool of magistrates who
became convinced of the existence of a widespread network of corruption linking the
worlds of business and politics. Di Pietro’s adroit use of computer technology enabled
him to track what he suspected were illegal payments, until a complaint against Mario
Chiesa, who was employed by a philanthropic trust but was closely involved with the
Milanese Socialist Party, gave him the opportunity he needed. Chiesa was caught red-
handed, and after a period of imprisonment provided information which incriminated
other public officials and politicians.
Subsequent suspects were equally willing to talk. Di Pietro revealed himself a
relentless interrogator, but he attracted criticism in some quarters for his willingness to
use preventive detention as a means of persuading suspects to collaborate. Investigations
widened out from Milan, and it came to seem that the entire system of government which
had ruled Italy since the war was on trial. Local and national politicians, cabinet
ministers, civil servants, financiers and businessmen found themselves under
investigation for giving or receiving bribes. The Socialist leader and ex-Prime Minister,
Bettino Craxi, was probably the most celebrated casualty, while the televised trial of the
financier Sergio Cusani in 1993–4 revealed to the nation both the forensic skills of Di
Pietro and the sheer scale of the political-financial intrigue involved. Silvio Berlusconi,
the first Prime Minister of the supposed ‘new’ order, was also incriminated over the
activities of his industrial empire, Fininvest.
Di Pietro was now lionized by ordinary Italians, but was increasingly vilified by the
Berlusconi press and embroiled in the machinations of his many enemies. He resigned
from the magistracy in 1994 in mysterious circumstances, amid allegations that he had
been blackmailed. Having expressed interest in a political career, he was courted by
several parties. His own political allegiances, although unclear, seemed to lie with the
Right, but perhaps because the right-wing coalition was headed by Berlusconi, from
whom he was divided by deep personal antipathy, he refused all Rightist affiliations and
in May 1996 accepted Romano Prodi’s invitation to become Minister for Public Works in
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 242
his centre-left cabinet. His period in office was undistinguished, and he resigned in
November of the same year when under inquiry by Brescia magistrates for alleged receipt
of illegal payments. He was completely exonerated, and in November 1997 was elected
to the Senate as a member of the Olive Tree coalition (see Ulivo).
See also: legal system
JOSEPH FARRELL
Di Venanzo, Gianni
b. 18 December 1920, Teramo; d. 3 January 1966, Rome
Cinematographer
At the time of his premature death at the age of forty-five, Di Venanzo was widely
regarded as Italy’s leading cinematographer. After serving as a young camera assistant
under Otello Martelli and G.R. Aldo on many of the classic neorealist films, including
Visconti’s La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles) (1948) and Rossellini’s Paisà (Paisan)
(1946), he became director of photography for Lizzani’s Achtung! Banditi! (Halt!
Bandits!) (1951), He subsequently worked on over forty films with most of the major
Italian directors including Monicelli, Fellini, Comencini and Lina Wertmüller. He
developed a particularly strong partnership with Antonioni, for whom he photographed
all of the early films with the exception of L’avventura (The Adventure) (1960), and with
Francesco Rosi, with whom he made all the films up to and including Le mani sulla città
(Hands over the City) (1963). An innovative and creative photographer, he experimented
with lighting and pioneered new techniques, thereby developing a distinctive personal
style which was nevertheless flexible enough to serve both the austerity of Antonioni’s
La notte (The Night) (1961) and the sumptuousness of Fellini’s 8½.
See also: cinematographers
GINO MOLITERNO
Diabolik
A comic book series first appearing in 1962, Diabolik was created by Angela and
Luciana Giussani, who modelled their stories on those of the criminal hero of French
popular literature, Fantomas, and added a touch of romance. Each episode presents the
thief, Diabolik, dressed in a black catsuit and assuming different disguises, performing
the most sensational and atrocious crimes, with no other aim than self-affirmation. He
always escapes the implacable pursuit of his almost as ingenious nemesis, Police
Commissioner Ginko, through his exceptional intelligence, audacity and the
indispensable help of his lover Eva Kant. Diabolik’s victims come from the aristocracy
Entries A–Z 243
and upper middle classes, and are shown as evildoers who hide their own crimes behind
their false morality and respectability.
In direct contrast to the American superheroes who put their powers in the service of
the law, Diabolik appealed to a transgressive and anticonformist teenage and adult
readership. Its format was also attractive, pocket-size like Topolino (Mickey Mouse),
while its cover carried the label ‘For adults only’. Its drawings were suggestively in black
and white, and its narrative was easy to read. Diabolik’s great success generated the
phenomenon of the fumetto new (crime comic), but it also survived the demise of the
latter by adapting to change in public taste while remaining fundamentally faithful to its
original formula.
See also: comics
FRANCO MANAI
dialect usage
Dialects are widely used in Italy. While the percentage of dialect monolinguals is very
low (around 7 per cent), and that of Italian monolinguals is somewhat higher (around 30
per cent), the vast majority of Italians are bilingual and alternate the use of both
languages in a complex and interesting way. Dialects are used more within the home than
outside, more in informal situations than in formal ones, and more in the northeast area,
the South and the islands than in the northwest and the centre of Italy. Older people use
them more than younger people, and men more than women; younger interlocutors, in
particular children, elicit minimal use of dialect, whereas maximal use occurs in
addressing older people. Furthermore, dialects are used more (1) among the lower
classes; (2) by people with lower levels of education but also, interestingly, by graduates
more than by people with high school diplomas; (3) in rural areas; and (4) in smaller
towns, particularly those with less than 2,000 inhabitants. Besides everyday
communication, they are used in other areas such as music and literature.
Use of dialects has been decreasing considerably since the Second World War as a
result of the spreading of the Italian language, and this may raise the question of their
disappearance in the near future. However, although dialects enjoy a lower prestige than
Italian, they are still a vital part of the repertoire of Italians, and today it is not so much a
matter of disappearance as of transformation, as the dialects increasingly become more
similar to Italian.
The changes that have occurred in dialect use at the national level were particularly
rapid in the decades 1950–90, concurrent with the rapid social and economic
transformations of postwar Italy. However, throughout the 1990s the decrease in dialect
usage seems to have slowed down. In 1951 more than 60 per cent of the Italian
population still used only dialect in most circumstances. Subsequent changes in use have
been recorded by a series of surveys conducted by Doxa, a public opinion poll research
institute. These surveys included questions on language use inside and outside the home
environment (with friends and work mates). Table 1 shows that use of dialect (1) is
constantly higher within the home than outside; (2) is higher among older people, men
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 244
and in the northeast, the South and the islands, within the home but more markedly so
outside; and (3) has constantly decreased from 1974 to 1991 while increasing slightly
outside the home throughout the 1990s.
Table 2 shows the incidence of the interlocutor’s age. Minimal use of dialect occurs in
talking to children, and the more so by young speakers, whereas maximal use occurs in
addressing older people, the more so by speakers of the same age or older.
Table 3 shows that, although the use of Italian only is on the increase, in the Doxa
surveys more
Table 1 Use of dialect in Italy according to age,
gender and geographical area (Doxa surveys)
1974 1982 1988 1991 1996
1
At home
Total Italy 51.3% 46.7% 39.6% 35.9% 33.9%
age
up to 34 yrs 46.0% 37.9% 31.2% 28.6% 24.7%
35–54 yrs 46.7% 46.7% 32.7% 32.9% 27.9%
beyond 54 yrs 64.0% 58.1% 57.1% 48.4% 48.0%
gender
women 49.3% 47.4% 36.2% 32.7% 31.9%
men 53.4% 46.0% 43.4% 39.4% 35.9%
geogr. area
Northwest 39.0% 37.2% 25.0% 20.2% 18.6%
Northeast 61.3% 59.6% 50.5% 51.0% 47.5%
Centre 33.2% 24.7% 24.1% 22.0% 24.0%
South & Islands 66.8% 60.6% 53.7% 48.5% 44.2%
Outside the home
2
Total Italy 42.3% 36.1% 33.2% 22.8% 28.2%
age
up to 34 yrs 31.4% 23.8% 22.3% 11.6% 18.0%
35–54 yrs 42.1% 37.5% 32.1% 24.6% 31.0%
beyond 54 yrs 55.7% 50.3% 48.7% 35.4% 53.0%
gender
women 40.3% 36.6% 29.0% 19.6% 25.6%
Entries A–Z 245
men 44.4% 35.6% 37.8% 26.3% 31.0%
geogr. area
Northwest 34.8% 29.0% 19.2% 12.9% 20.9%
Northeast 55.2% 53.2% 51.0% 37.7% 38.9%
Centre 23.7% 14.7% 19.0% 12.2% 19.2%
South and Islands 52.2% 45.2% 42.2% 29.1% 33.2%
Notes:
1 For 1996, the percentages against the age brackets have been calculated by collapsing the six age
brackets provided by Doxa.
2 These percentages include both the respondents who ‘always use dialect’ and those who ‘use
more dialect than Italian’.
Table 2 Use of dialect outside the home in Italy,
1996 (Doxa survey)
interlocutors
subjects children younger same age older
15–24 years 6.8% 13.1% 17.3% 20.7%
25–34 years 5.6% 9.3% 12.7% 21.9%
35–44 years 10.5% 14.1% 21.2% 29.9%
45–54 years 10.9% 19.6% 32.6% 39.6%
55–64 years 18.6% 26.6% 45.5% 49.2%
beyond 64 years 21.4% 31.6% 58.7% 60.7%
Table 3 Use of dialect and Italian in Italy (Doxa
Survey)
Language use at home
1974 1982 1988 1991 1996
Dialect with all family members 51.3% 46.7% 39.6% 35.9% 33.9%
Italian with all family members 25.0% 29.4% 34.4% 33.6% 33.7%
Dialect with some, Italian with others 23.7% 23.9% 26.0% 30.5% 32.4%
Language use outside the home
1974 1982 1988 1991 1996
Always uses dialect 28.9% 23.0% 23.3% 12.8% 15.3%
Always uses Italian 22.7% 26.7% 31.0% 29.9% 32.6%
Uses both Italian and dialect 22.1% 22.0% 19.5% 29.1% 22.2%
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 246
Uses more dialect than Italian 13.4% 13.1% 9.9% 10.0% 12.9%
Uses more Italian than dialect 12.9% 15.2% 16.3% 18.2% 17.0%
than one quarter of the subjects within the home and more than half outside still declare
they use both the dialect and Italian.
The division in the use of dialect and Italian is not clearcut, as the shift away from
dialect has been occurring not so much in the direction of the exclusive use of Italian, but
more commonly of the alternate use of the two languages also within conversation. The
alternation of dialect and Italian in conversation, or ‘code switching’, has not yet been
researched extensively. It seems however that it occurs more in rural areas than in urban
ones, and more frequently and in a wider range of social situations in some regions (for
example, Veneto and Sicily) than in others. Patterns of switching also seem to vary, as in
rural areas it tends to be from a dialect base into Italian, whereas in urban areas it is often
limited to the insertion of dialect words in Italian-based discourse. The latter is more
evident in the speech of younger generations and may be due to their inadequate
competence of dialect.
Switching between dialect and Italian can also be connected to situational factors,
among which interlocutor and topic tend to play a prominent role. Typically, interlocutors
belonging to the same network and more personal topics elicit switches towards dialect.
However, asymmetrical conversations, where one participant uses dialect and the other
Italian, are also very frequent. Switching can also be linked to (1) the organization of
discourse, for example to reformulate, to add a side comment or to signal a quotation; (2)
the speaker’s language preferences or competence; or (3) specific conversational
functions, such as switches to dialect for special emphasis, for expressive or emotive
reasons, or jokingly. However, the frequent bi-directionality of switching indicates that
often it is the contrastive use of the two languages to be meaningful, rather than the single
switch into either language. Furthermore, dialect-Italian switching generally occurs in a
smooth way, without any signalling to the interlocutor. This has been attributed to the
fact that, since in Italy speaker and interlocutor belong to the same bilingual community,
they do not need to negotiate the linguistic rules of their behaviour.
As extensively used in everyday conversation as switching is dialect-Italian mixing,
where forms from each language alternate within the same utterance in an often
inextricable way: for example, None quedda. Sta ancora questa. Sai ce d-è? quiddu
magglione bianco, quiddu grande che comprai io (Sobrero 1988) (‘Not that one. There is
still this one. You know what is it? That white jumper, the big one that I bought’ (my
translation)). This excerpt shows mixing between dialect and regional Italian, with dialect
affecting Italian in terms of sounds, grammar and word choice. Mixing is favoured by the
structural similarity between dialects and Italian and by the reciprocal interference caused
by their intense contact, whereby dialect forms become Italianized and Italian forms take
on dialectal features. For example, words can be made up by lexical morphemes of one
language and grammatical morphemes of the other, so that it can be difficult to assign
them to either language: for example, Sicilian appizzare with the Sicilian meaning of
perdere, ‘to miss out’, and the Italian verbal ending -are. Due to the structural similarity,
the occurrence of mixed words and the high number of homophones, dialect-Italian
switching and mixing tend to occur freely without any structural restriction.
Entries A–Z 247
Another area where dialect is used is in literature. Interestingly, after the Second
World War, poetry in dialect has developed considerably, possibly as a reaction against
the levelling of the Italian language, and is particularly thriving in some regions like the
Veneto, with such poets as Noventa and Zanzotto. On the other hand, the general decline
of dialects in Italian society seems to have determined also their decline in narrative,
where today they have a rather marginal role. However, many contemporary writers still
make use of some dialect in their works, particularly at the lexical and syntactic levels
(for example, Mastronardi or Sciascia).
Dialect is not much used in the cinema, probably because it would not be understood
by the wider audience. However, Italian-dialect mixing is fairly common, and has
become the distinctive speech style of some actors, such as the Neapolitan of Massimo
Troisi or the Florentine of Roberto Benigni. Some dialect is used in advertising, often to
link the product to past ages and thus underline its high quality. Dialect is also used in
music, by groups that perform traditional folk songs, for example Nuova Compagnia di
Canto Popolare, as well as by other singers or songwriters. A more recent phenomenon
is the formation of rock bands that choose to sing in dialect, such as Pitura Freska in the
Veneto or the 99 Posse in Naples (see rap music).
Dialects are also used outside of Italy, for example in some parts of Switzerland
(Lombard) or of Corsica (Tuscan), and in the numerous communities of Italian migrants.
The secessionist movements such as Lega Nord use dialect as a symbol of their struggle
for autonomy, but they do not seem to have been particularly effective in reversing the
shift away from dialect, particularly among the younger generations. The impact of these
movements, however, has yet to be investigated systematically.
See also: cantautori; dialects; Italian language; Italian outside Italy; Italian and
emigration; language attitudes; language education; language policy; literature in dialect;
varieties of Italian
Further reading
Anonymous (1996) ‘L’uso del dialetto’ (The Use of Dialect), in Bollettino della Doxa 50 (16–17),
17 September.
Alfonzetti, G. (1992) Il discorso bilingue. Italiano e dialetto a Catania, (Bilingual Discourse:
Italian and Dialect in Catania), Milan: Franco Angeli (a study of Italian—Sicilian code
switching in a range of social situations; see chaps 2 and 3).
Giacalone Ramat, A. (1995) ‘Code-Switching in the Context of Dialect/Standard Language
Relations’, in L.Milroy and P.Muysken (eds), One Speaker, Two Languages: Cross-disciplinary
Per-spectives on Code-switching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (an in-depth
discussion of the issues raised by code switching in the light of the specific Italian situation).
Sobrero, A.A. (1988) ‘Villages and Towns in Salento: The Way Code Switching Switches’, in
N.Dittmar and P.Schlobinski (eds), The Sociolinguistics of Urban Vernaculars: Case Studies
and Their Evaluation, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
——(1994) ‘Code Switching in Dialectal Communities in Italy’, Rivista di Linguistica 6 (1):39–55
(an overview of the major sociolinguistic variables of Italian-dialect code switching).
ANTONIA RUBINO
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 248
dialects
Italian dialects are separate languages geographically distributed throughout the
peninsula, which differ from each other to the extent of being mutually unintelligible if
they belong to non-adjacent areas. The reason for such profound diversity is to be found
initially in a different evolution of spoken Latin in the various parts of Italy during the
Middle Ages, and in the following centuries of political fragmentation before final
unification in 1861. In relation to the Italian language—the national language—today
the dialects are ‘low languages’ in the sense that they are used mainly orally in a
narrower geographical area (dialect usage). Although they are still very vital, in the last
decades they have been undergoing a process of Italianization as a result of their intense
contact with Italian and the latter’s increasing use nationwide. Consequently, dialects are
tending to become more uniform throughout their region or province as they are losing
their more local features. At the same time, they also influence the way Italian is used in
the various regions, particularly at the level of pronunciation and vocabulary (see
varieties of Italian).
The formation of dialects dates from the last centuries of the Roman empire, when the
central power started to decline and cultural and linguistic models began to weaken. The
already existing difference between literary and spoken Latin increased remarkably,
particularly when Italy was split into separate areas after the fall of the empire. Political
autonomy favoured linguistic fragmentation, and thus many distinct languages
developed. The first documents which prove the existence in Italy of languages
significantly different from Latin date back to the end of the first millennium. From
approximately the year 1000, these languages developed considerably, particularly as
spoken languages but also in writing. Some of them were especially prestigious in that
they were the languages of important and thriving towns, such as Milan, Bologna,
Florence and Palermo, where the first literary works were also written.
This situation of polycentrism changed from the fourteenth century onwards as a result
of the increasing importance of Florence as the major economic, political, cultural and
literary centre. The fact that three eminent writers—Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca
(Petrarch) and Giovanni Boccaccio—wrote in Florentine gave high prestige to this
language, while Florence’s status as a major commercial centre contributed to promoting
it. Between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Florentine continued to spread as a
written language next to Latin well outside Tuscany, and became the basis of the national
literary language, Italian. From this point onwards Italian was the high language, and all
the others began to be considered dialects.
In the following four centuries, the various dialects were used practically by the whole
population for speaking purposes, while a narrow elite also used Italian (or Latin and
French) for writing. However, on a much smaller scale, some dialects were also used for
literary works (for example, Venetian in Goldoni’s plays). This gap between speech and
writing continued until the country was unified (1861) as well as throughout several
decades after unification, due to the poor socioeconomic conditions of the new state and
continuing high levels of illiteracy. In spite of their widespread use, dialects were
stigmatized as an obstacle to the learning of ‘correct’ Italian, particularly by
schoolchildren, and thus to the spreading of a single national language. The repression of
Entries A–Z 249
dialects reached its climax during Fascism, when they were seen as counter to the
nationalism and centralism that were essential to the Fascist regime. Thus, publications in
dialect were banned (1931) and dialects were excluded from schools (1934). In spite of
the absence of such prohibitions after the fall of Fascism, the use of dialects continued to
decrease in the postwar period.
Geographically, Italian dialects form a continuum, such that those of adjacent areas
differ only minimally while more distant ones differ to a greater extent. The traditional
classification divides them into three main groups: Northern, Central and Southern
dialects, separated by two lines: La Spezia-Rimini and Ancona-Rome.
The La Spezia-Rimini line divides Northern from Central (more specifically, Tuscan)
dialects. Some of the phonetic features distinguishing the two groups are the following:
(1) voiced intervocalic consonants to the north versus voiceless ones to the south of the
line (for example, [d] versus [t], as in [fra’dεl] instead of fratello, ‘brother’); (2) single
intervocalic consonants to the north versus double ones to the south of the line (for
example [‘fato] for fatto, ‘fact’; (3) deletion of unstressed final vowels to the north of the
line (for example, [ka’val] for cavallo, ‘horse’). At the grammatical level, Northern
dialects substitute subject pronouns io (‘I’) and tu (‘you’), with the equivalent object
forms mi (‘me’) and ti (‘you’).
The Ancona-Rome line separates Central from Southern dialects. At the phonetic
level, Southern dialects are distinguished by particular consonant groups: -nd- instead of-
nt- (e.g., quanto, ‘how much’, becomes [‘kwando]); -nn- instead of -nd- (e.g., manda,
‘send’, becomes [‘manna]); and -mm-instead of -mb- (e.g., gamba, ‘leg’, becomes
[‘gamma]). A second important feature of Southern dialects compared with the Central
ones, and Tuscan in particular, is metaphony, that is, a process of assimilation between
non-adjacent vowels in a word; in Southern dialects this is often triggered by final
unstressed [i] and [u] which cause changes in the preceding stressed vowels (e.g.,
Southern Latium niru for the masculine singular nero ‘black’, and niri for the masculine
plural neri, given that [e] becomes [i] under the influence of final [u] and [i] respectively,
versus the feminine singular nera which maintains [e]). At the grammatical level,
Southern dialects are characterized by possessive adjectives postposed and attached to the
nouns they refer to (e.g., matrima for mia madre, ‘my mother’). Further-more, a number
of words distinguish Central from Southern dialects, such as donna versus femmina for
‘woman’, or fratello versus frate for ‘brother’.
Within the three main groups of dialects, some further subdivisions can be identified.
Among the Northern dialects, the so-called Gallo-Italian dialects (in Piedmont,
Lombardy, Liguria and Emilia-Romagna) are distinguished from those of the Veneto
region. Some of the main features of the Gallo-Italian dialects are the following: rounded
vowels [ö] [ü] (e.g., [‘lüm] for lume, ‘lamp’); palatalization of [a] into either [ε] or [e]
(e.g., [’sεl] for sale, ‘salt’); and deletion of unstressed vowels, either in final position or
preceding stressed vowels (e.g., man for mano, ‘hand’, or
fnestra for finestra, ‘window’).
Furthermore, the Latin consonant group -kt- has developed into -jt- in parts of Piedmont
and into [t∫] in Lombardy: for example, Latin ‘noctem’ has become [‘nojt] and [‘not∫]
respectively for the Italian notte, ‘night’. On the other hand, in the dialects from the
Veneto region, the same consonant group -kt- has developed into [t], so that the word is
[‘note].
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