Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
formality of the situation as well as with individual variables, such as levels of education
or length of stay abroad.
In the Italian and dialect speech of the second generation, some instances of the
stronger impact of the host language may be, for the Englishspeaking countries, (1) the
aspirated pronunciation of [t] and [p] under the influence of the English sounds, (2) a
phrase like una rossa macchina, ‘a red car’, with the wrong position of the Italian
adjective, or (3) the widespread use of the informal tu at the expense of the formal lei
under the influence of the generalized ‘you’. Furthermore, words from the host language
may be used in the Italian speech with the original sounds and grammatical structures.
With regard to code switching (l’ho visto proprio lì in the middle of the shopping centre,
‘I saw him right there’, where the first part of the sentence is Italian, the second English),
it has been observed that it can also be used by more competent second-generation
Italians to express or negotiate particular meanings or values, for example, to reaffirm
their Italian identity.
Overall, the Italian and dialect speech of the second generation displays a high level of
variation, not just between these two languages and the host language but also between
Italian and dialect. While the more competent speakers may be able to control the shift
between these two languages, for the less competent ones it is a case of not being able to
keep them apart. Another major trait shown by the least competent speakers is the
simplification of Italian grammatical endings.
The levels of Italian and dialect competence among second-generation Italians tend to
vary a great deal, from a limited passive knowledge displayed by the subjects in studies
conducted in Australia or Canada, to the almost native-speaker competence in popular
regional Italian and in dialect which has been observed in Switzerland. Besides the
geographical distance, some of the factors that can account for such variability include
parents’ length of stay in the host country (especially for transoceanic migration); number
of children in the family, with an only child maintaining the languages better than a child
with siblings; and birth order in the family, with the first child maintaining the languages
better than younger siblings. More specifically, knowledge of Italian rather than of dialect
seems to increase with increased contact with Italy and with Italian relatives abroad, or if
parents are from different regions and therefore do not use the dialect in talking to each
other, or through instruction at school.
With regard to the first generation, given the rapid changes in the Italian
sociolinguistic context from the 1950s onwards (see dialect usage), competence of
Italian tends to be higher among postwar than prewar migrants even though a dialect is
still the first language. Thus, the lingua franca of prewar migrants was often a common
dialect which was formed either by the levelling out of differences among the various
dialects or by the spreading of the dialect spoken by the dominant regional group (such as
the Venetian dialect in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil). Among postwar migrants, on the other
hand, a popular regional variety of Italian (see varieties of Italian) is used as the
language of the community.
Italian migrant communities outside Italy can boast of a considerable production of
literary as well as more broadly artistic works (such as films), which often deal with
various aspects of the migration experience. In many of these works, the language used
aims to reflect and highlight the linguistic phenomena in progress in the community, in
particular the different preferences and competencies across generations.
Entries A–Z 421
See also: dialects; dialect usage; emigration; Istituti italiani di cultura; Italian
language; Italian outside Italy; language policy
Further reading
Bettoni, C. (ed.) (1986) Altro Polo, Italian Abroad: Studies on Language Contact in English-
Speaking Countries, Sydney: University of Sydney, F. May Foundation for Italian Studies
(essays on various sociolinguistic aspects of Italian migration in Australia, Canada, Great
Britain, New Zealand and USA).
——(1993) ‘Italiano fuori d’Italia’, in A.A.Sobrero (ed.), Introduzione all’italiano contemporaneo.
La variazione e gli usi (Introduction to Contemporary Italian: Variation and Usages), Bari:
Laterza (a discussion of the main issues affecting Italian and dialects in postwar migrant
communities).
Bettoni, C. and Rubino, A. (1996) Emigrazione e comportamento linguistico. Un’indagine sul
trilinguismo dei siciliani e dei veneti in Australia (Emigration and Linguistic Behaviour: An
Investigation of the Trilingualism of Sicilians and Venetians in Australia), Galatina: Congedo (a
detailed study on the use of Italian, dialect and English in a range of social domains among first-
and second-generation subjects in Australia, with comparative data from other host countries).
Haller, H. (1993) Una lingua perduta e ritrovata. L’italiano degli italo-americani (A Language
Lost and Rediscovered: The Italian of ItaloAmericans), Florence: La Nuova Italia (a collection
of essays on the presence of Italian and dialects in the language of migrants, the media and
English itself in the USA).
Lo Cascio, V. (ed.) (1987) L’italiano in America Latina (Italian in Latin America), Florence: Le
Monnier (various essays on language shift in the Italian communities in South and Central
American countries).
ANTONIA RUBINO
Italian language
Italian is the official language of Italy, now spoken by almost all Italians within the
national borders, and outside them by several groups of different peoples and by Italian
emigrants.
Italian is a Romance language within the IndoEuropean family It derives its formal
characteristics from the evolution of Latin as shaped by Italy’s cultural history.
Compared to other Romance languages, Italian is more conservative in the sense that,
although it came about somewhat later in the Middle Ages, it was from its beginnings
closer to Latin and then changed less dramatically throughout the following centuries.
Yet in another sense, it can be considered younger and now more unstable, since it was
only in the twentieth century that the majority of Italians, who had previously spoken
only their dialects, began to use it and thus to weaken the elitist forces that had kept it
stable for so long. Once undeniably Florentinebased in its standard form, it is now
represented by numerous varieties of Italian which are both regionally and socially
marked, and of which the standard form is but one, arguably not even the most
appreciated one (see language attitudes). According to how we see the Italian language,
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 422
we might assign to it three very different dates of birth: the Middle Ages, the sixteenth
century and the twentieth century.
First, we can use the label ‘Italian’ retrospectively for Florentine, that is, for one of the
new Romance languages that came about from the gradual evolution of Vulgar Latin in
the second half of the first millennium. Strictly speaking, until the sixteenth century there
was no ‘Italian’: in the Middle Ages there was classical Latin, the learned international
language of high culture, acquired by study and used for writing by the very few who
were literate, and there were numerous local native languages, acquired in infancy and
used in everyday speech. These new languages gradually consolidated into a written form
and enjoyed varying prestige according to the political and economic power of their area
and the excellence of their literature. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, in his De
Vulgari Eloquentia (About the Vulgar Tongue), Dante distinguished fourteen of them. As
there was no unitary state, Dante also stressed the lack of a common new language for the
whole of Italy. Among these languages, Florentine was undoubtedly the language of a
powerful, wealthy and cultured small state spreading its influence well beyond its city
borders.
Secondly, as a national language, Italian came about in the sixteenth century when
Florentine came to be largely accepted outside Tuscany. Although Italy was still
politically fragmented into regional states, the need for a common language became
overwhelming in the new world of the courtiers’ Signorie. Latin was still of course
widely known and used by the literate elites, but paradoxically the humanists’ revival of
Latin in the fifteenth century had shown the widening gap between the ancient or
medieval worlds and the modern one. Latin could therefore still be used (and was in fact
used for at least a further two centuries) in the domains where little was changing, such as
the Church and the law, but it needed replacement in the new domains, especially the
literary one. The absence of a strong national centre in early sixteenth-century Italy,
analogous to Paris in French cultural life or London in the English, meant that there was
no obvious choice for its national language. Various proposals were put forward, but
since the strongest need for a common language was elitist, cultural and literary, the
choice ultimately fell on the old Florentine which two centuries before had reached its
highest glory with Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Other factors also contributed to this
choice: the central geographic location of the Tuscan language; its linguistic forms, often
intermediate between the southern and northern ones; its conservatism, that had kept it
somewhat closer to Latin; and the cultural and commercial vitality of the region, whose
merchants and bankers were active nationally.
With the promotion of Florentine to the status of national Italian, all the other local
languages found themselves in the position of dialects, that is, of ‘low’, less prestigious
languages compared to the ‘high’ national one, even if no changes had occurred in their
formal characteristics. On the other hand, the newly promoted Italian begun to lose some
of its most provincial Tuscanisms and to shape itself into the language we know today.
From the sixteenth century onwards, the diffusion of printing, the careful watch of an
authoritative academy (the Accademia della Crusca in Florence; see language
institutions), the compliance of non-Tuscan writers of great prestige, and more generally
the stagnation of Italian cultural life all contributed to the remarkable stability of Italian
well into this century. In fact, contemporary Italians can read their sixteenth-century
Entries A–Z 423
texts, and indeed even their fourteenth-century literature (Petrarch in particular), with far
greater ease than the English, French or Germans can read theirs of the same periods.
While the high position enjoyed by Italian assured its stability and status, it did not
assure its liveliness. In fact, all Italians, irrespective of rank and education, continued to
speak in their local dialects, which were often used also for written texts, particularly
those dealing with practical matters and the lower literary genres (such as comedy), and
those produced in the larger, most powerful states (such as the Venetian Republic). On
the basis of census and literacy figures, the linguist Tullio De Mauro has estimated that at
the time of Italy’s unification in 1861, the number of Italians able to use Italian could not
have amounted to more than 600,000, representing 2.5 per cent of the total population.
Since this figure includes 400,000 Tuscans and 70,000 Romans, and refers only to the
ability to use it rather than to its everyday use, Italian can hardly be considered a national
language in the popular sense. In linguistic matters, in fact, the intellectuals rather than
contemporary usage were the arbiters, and constant campaigns were fought to preserve a
high literary model from the corrupting influences coming from outside (French and
English) and from below (the dialects). The questions della lingua (language question) is
a four-century-long debate which periodically deals with deeply controversial issues
relating to purist principles and rebellion against them. This complex controversy cannot
always be resolved simplistically by equating the purists with the reactionary and wrong,
and their more innovative enemies with the progressive and correct, since purism at
certain times could also represent progressive patriotic attitudes. In any case, the
aspirations to perfection and detachment from ordinary life which characterized the
debate on the Italian language deeply affected the literary production in favour of the
genres that escape further from reality, such as lyric poetry, to the detriment of those that
more closely reflect it, such as the theatre and the novel. They also distanced the Italian-
speaking intellectuals from the common people who spoke only the dialects.
Thirdly, as a truly national and popular language used also by the masses throughout
the Italian nation, Italian only began its fully fledged life in the twentieth century, at first
timidly and then more forcefully after the Second World War. Many factors contributed
to its spread from the upper to the lower classes. At unification in 1861, the questione
della lingua became a political and social issue for the new Italian state, and although
little was achieved in practice, various solutions to the problem of educating Italians and
teaching them their national language were at least debated. During the century that
followed, emigration abroad taught illiterate people the value of literacy for securing
better jobs and communicating with distant relatives. Especially after the Second World
War, emigration from the South to the industrial North, and from rural areas to the cities,
also brought people with different dialects into contact; increased urbanization led to
wider attendance at school and more frequent occasions requiring the use of Italian (visits
to administrative offices, and so on). The rapid industrialization of the so-called
economic miracle encouraged not only geographical homogenization but also more
education and greater dialogue between social classes. The new national bureaucracy
imposed a uniform language, and compulsory military service brought together young
men from all parts of the country. The growth of mass media, especially radio, first
introduced in 1924, and then television which began broadcasting in 1954 (see RAI), also
played an important role. Finally, even the Church began celebrating mass in Italian,
abandoning the use of Latin after the Second Vatican Council in 1962–5. In this
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 424
progressive spread of the Italian language, fascism, contrary to its intentions, contributed
very little (see also fascism and neo-fascism). While rhetorically it promoted a language
policy in favour of the strong, glorious and pure national language and violently
repressed the dialects, in practice it did nothing to create the conditions for a wider use of
the former, and succeeded only in discrediting the latter.
The recent widespread use of Italian by most Italians for a great variety of purposes,
both oral and written, has brought about important formal changes. Freed from the
normative canons of the academies and the straitjackets of the literary models, Italian is
rapidly evolving in two main directions. On the one hand, there is a development towards
a common mass language adjusted to middle-level tastes, which, given the elitist past, is
more of a welcome simplification and search for more effective clarity than a
banalization; on the other, in reaction against this mass language, geographical and social
varieties of Italian are being maintained more strongly, and sectorial languages are being
created in an attempt to express special interests, such as those of the sciences, the media
and sports. The interplay among all these varieties, including the old dialects, far from
constituting a weakness, represents the vitality and richness of the national culture.
See also: Italian and emigration; Italian lexicon; Italian morphology; Italian outside
Italy; Italian syntax; Italian phonology; language attitudes; language education; language
policy; minority languages
Further reading
Lepschy, A.L. and Lepschy, G. (1977) The Italian Language Today, London: Hutchinson (a
description of contemporary Italian preceded by a long introduction examining ‘some aspects of
its history which have often led people to wonder whether an “Italian” language really existed’).
Migliorini, B. and Griffith, T.G. (1984) The Italian Language, 2nd edn, London: Faber & Faber (on
the history of Italian, a basic work is still Migliorini’s Storia della Lingua Italiana, Florence:
Sansoni, 1960, which stops at 1915; a 1964 abridged edition was extended to the 1960s by I.
Baldelli, as Breve storia della Lingua Italiana, Florence: Sansoni; this was abridged and
reedited in English by T. Griffith in 1966).
Sobrero, A.A. (ed.) (1993) Introduzione all’italiano contemporaneo. Vol. I: Le strutture. Vol. II: La
variazione e gli usi (Introduction to Contemporary Italian, Vol. I: The Structures, Vol. II:
Variation and Usage), Bari: Laterza (an excellent twovolume collection of essays written by
specialists covering the main areas of contemporary forms and usage).
Vincent, N. (1988) ‘Italian’, in M.Harris and N.Vincent (eds), The Romance Languages, London:
Routledge (an excellent introduction, including the historical dimension and an eye to the
future).
CAMILLA BETTONI
Italian lexicon
The vocabulary of a language is an accurate, if complex, record of the history of the
society in which the language is spoken. As a member of the Romance family of
Entries A–Z 425
languages, Italian draws the vast majority of its vocabulary from Latin. The base
vocabulary of Italian is derived from Vulgar Latin, the informal register of colloquial
Latin which evolved into the various Romance languages. So-called Classical Latin, the
formal register of Roman times and the international language of high culture during
medieval and Renaissance times, also provided a layer of learned input. These two Latin
sources can be seen in different words relating to the same object—cavallo ‘horse’ and
equestre ‘equestrian’—and in different outcomes of the same Latin word—piazza
‘square’ and platea ‘stall in a theatre’, both from Latin platea.
The historical vicissitudes of the country appear in the various strands of the lexicon.
During the late Roman Empire, Greek words were adopted in Christian Latin and thence
into Italian: the Greek ecclesia produced chiesa (church), and also the (learned) adjective
ecclesiastico. The barbarian invasions left behind words of Germanic origin such as
guerra ‘war’ and bianco ‘white’, and the Arab domination of the Mediterranean (and
Sicily) also left its mark with dogana ‘customs’ and albicocca ‘apricot’. The later
ascendancy of Spain and of France produced considerable new vocabulary: from the
former came etichetta ‘etiquette’ and posate ‘cutlery’, and from the latter came ragù
‘ragout’ and parruca ‘wig’.
In describing the development of the Italian lexicon in more recent times, it is useful
to distinguish between two modes of lexical enrichment: borrowings which enter the
language from some other source, and ‘neologisms’, derived from pre-existing words.
Italian has borrowed internally and externally. Internal sources are the dialects and the
sectorial languages. The variety of vocabulary items among the dialects is legendary. As
the dialect-speaking population acquired Italian as a second language, many dialect
words have entered the regional vocabularies of Italian, usually undergoing some
Italianization in the process. A 1951 survey asked 124 persons from 54 provinces what
name they used for 242 different concepts: only one, ‘strong black coffee served in a
bar’, was given the same name by all informants (espresso). Such rich geographical
variation is still a major feature of spoken Italian.
The sectorial languages are a rich source of new vocabulary. Technical meanings are
applied to common vocabulary (examples are scaricare ‘download’ and motore di
ricerca ‘search engine’); old metaphors are reworked to fit new technologies as in the
extension of the language of maritime navigation to space travel to produce astronauta
‘astronaut’, and later to hypertextuality to produce navigare ‘navigate’. New words from
styles such as youth language usually enter colloquial or non-standard varieties of Italian.
Youth slang is somewhat Janus-faced in deriving new lexicon from international (mostly
English-language) youth culture and also from local dialects, as well as from free
creativity.
Italian has also absorbed words from other languages. The international status of
English makes it the primary donor of foreign words to Italian, although other languages
appear according to circumstances, such as the Brazilian goleador ‘goal-scorer (in
soccer)’, the Iranian khomeinista and the Russian glasnost. Anglicisms enter the language
through all aspects of social life. They tend not to be integrated morphologically and to
conserve their original meaning and spelling until well accepted in common parlance,
though some show unpredictable changes in meaning, such as the classic footing
‘jogging’, mister ‘soccer coach’, or box, which may mean ‘shower cubicle’, ‘garage’ or
‘baby’s playpen’ (boxe is French and means the sport of boxing), and others present
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 426
interesting formal features: fans (as well as fan) is the singular word for a ‘fan’ or
‘supporter’.
Attitudes to foreign words in Italian are in general relaxed, and their use is sometimes
associated with positive attributes such as travel and education. The attempt by the
Fascists to legislate in this area was mostly a failure, except for a few creations which
have remained to this day: calcio d’angolo for ‘corner kick’; rete alternates with goal (or
gol). Newspaper columnists and letter writers occasionally muse on the extent of English
usage (usually in newspapers themselves) and the consequent danger to the vitality of the
Italian language itself. Research suggests, however, that in everyday spoken language the
presence of foreign words is of the order of one per thousand words (De Mauro, 1993).
Even more telling is the expansion of the lexicon through the creation of neologisms,
by means of the processes of derivational morphology (see Italian morphology). These
affect words originating in Italian itself, sectorial languages, dialects or foreign
languages: examples include interpiattaforma ‘cross-platform’, managerial ‘managerial’,
and managerialità (the root manager is ultimately of Latin origin, so the ‘borrowing’
from English is actually a return), sviluppatore ‘(software) developer’, malavitoso, from
malavita ‘underworld’, interfaccia ‘interface’ (and the verb interfacciare), Palasport, a
contraction of Palazzo dello Sport, ‘sports stadium’ and scuolabus ‘school bus’. What is
significant here is not so much the new words themselves as the processes which create
them and the new confidence with which Italian speakers are experimenting with the
lexicon. Many of the derivational processes are well documented in the history of Italian,
but their creative potential is only now being released. They are at the same time bringing
the lexicon of Italian into line with trends observed in the other languages of Europe.
In the opposite direction, a number of words of Italian origin have become
international words, usually via American English, for example ciao, from the Venetian
dialect form of the salutation (vostro) schiavo ‘your servant’; jeans, from Gênes, the
French name for Genova (Genoa); or baloney/polony, from Bologna.
An interesting phenomenon of the 1980s was the commercial success of dictionaries,
which were published in large numbers and often appeared in bestseller lists. These could
be seen as a sign of renewed interest in linguistic matters, of delight among literate
Italians at the expanding riches of the language or, perhaps, of insecurity in the face of so
many changes in such a short time.
See also: Italian language; Italian morphology; varieties of Italian
Further reading
De Mauro, T. et al (1993) Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano parlato, Milan: Etas Libri.
Sobrero, A.A. (ed.) (1993) Introduzione all’italiano contemporaneo, Bari: Laterza (see M.Dardano,
‘Lessico e semantica’; A.A.Sobrero, ‘Lingue speciali’; E.Radtke, ‘Lingue giovanili’; and P.
Ramat, ‘L’italiano lingua d’Europa’).
Vincent, N. (1988) ‘Italian’, in M.Harris and N. Vincent (eds), The Romance Languages, London:
Routledge (has a section on the history of Italian lexicon and current trends).
JOHN J.KINDER
Entries A–Z 427
Italian morphology
The Italian language has a rich morphology. Words change their form much more
frequently than in English. They do so in two main ways. Inflectional morphology creates
different forms of the ‘same word’ according to its grammatical function; and
derivational morphology derives ‘new words’ from others.
Inflectional morphology affects nouns (and related parts of speech, adjectives,
pronouns and articles) and verbs. Noun morphology shows distinctions of number
(singular and plural) and gender (masculine and feminine); verb morphology carries
information on number, tense, aspect and mood. Invariable parts of speech, which do not
change their form, are prepositions (unless they combine with articles), adverbs and
conjunctions. The morphological distinctions are usually made through word endings and
are clearly marked, since Italian has retained, from its Latin heritage, clear vowel sounds
at the end of words which carry the morphological information.
Italian morphology has in general remained richer than that of the other Romance
languages, in part because as a primarily written language it was, until recent times,
protected from the natural effects of widespread use in speech.
Derivational morphology is the process of forming nouns, adjectives and verbs from
other nouns, adjectives and verbs. This is achieved by the use of prefixes and suffixes and
through composition. Prefixes produce words of the same class as the base—nazionale
(national), internazionale (international)—while suffixes can produce words of the same
class or of another class, such as nazione (noun), nazionale (adjective), nazionalizzare
(verb), nazionalizzazione (noun). Composition is the process of combining two or more
words, from the same or different classes: portaborse ‘bagman’ (literally ‘bag carrier’),
telecomando ‘remote control device’, or pastasciutta, literally ‘dry pasta’, i.e. not in broth
(see pasta).
Italian also has a rich repertoire of affective derivational suffixes which express the
qualities of the object in question, especially size, and the speaker’s attitude to it. They
express subtle shades of intensity: caldo-calduccio ‘hot-quite hot’, sudato—sudaticcio
‘sweaty-a little sweaty’, febbre-febbrone ‘fever-strong fever’; and complex ranges of
emotional attachment, including endearment (mamma—mammina ‘mummy-darling
mummy’), irony (furbo—furbacchione ‘cunning person-crafty so-and-so’) or censure
(vita—vitaccia ‘life—rotten life’). In many cases the suffixed word acquires a distinct
meaning: cucchiaio ‘spoon’, cucchiaino ‘teaspoon’; orso ‘bear’, orsacchiotto ‘teddy
bear’.
All Italian words end in a vowel, except for a few prepositions—con ‘with’, per
‘for’—and unintegrated words of Latin origin, such as ribes ‘black-currant’. This basic
principle of morphological structure is now coexisting with modern borrowings from
other languages such as sport and box, and with acronyms such as Fiat and USL. Foreign
words tend to be assigned to masculine gender if nouns and to the first, unmarked,
conjugation -are if verbs. Anglicisms tend to remain invariable: la star—le star.
The most conspicuous effect of the recent history of Italian has been the
rationalization of several morphological sub-systems, for example, the reduction in the
pronouns and in the number of verb tenses in general use, which implies that the
categories in use are being exploited to express a richer range of meanings.
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 428
See also: Italian language; Italian lexicon; Italian syntax; Italian phonology
Further reading
Sobrero, A.A. (ed.) (1993) Introduzione all’italiano contemporaneo, Bari: Laterza (see M.Berretta,
‘Morfologia’; R.Simone, ‘Stabilità e instabilità nei caratteri originali dell’italiano’).
Vincent, N. (1988) ‘Italian’, in M.Harris and N. Vincent (eds), The Romance Languages, London:
Routledge (a comprehensive description with a historical dimension and an eye to future
developments).
JOHN J. KINDER
Italian outside Italy
Outside the confines of Italy, the Italian language is used both as one of the four national
and three official languages of Switzerland, and is also spoken in regional varieties along
its immediate border areas to the west, as well as to the east (Istria). Historically, Italian
had a strong linguistic tradition in the islands of Corsica, where it continues to flourish as
a dialectal substratum in the new Corsican language, and in Malta, as well as along the
Dalmatian coast. In addition to its fundamental role as a language of culture in Europe
principally from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, as a language of emigration
throughout the world particularly since the industrial age, and as a language studied by a
population of about one million, Italian was also brought to northern and eastern Africa
as a colonial language during Fascist rule. Where it is spoken as an autochthonous idiom
outside Switzerland, Italian tends to be exposed to the pressures, language shifts and
attritions that typify the fate of minority languages. On the other hand, due to the modern
mass media, Italian as a spoken second language is alive in many countries of the
Mediterranean rim (for example, in Northern Africa, Albania, Greece).
Italian is the language of a population of 250,000 in the Canton Ticino; at 4 per cent, it
ranks as the third language of Switzerland, behind German and French. The region, south
of the Swiss Alps and at the doorsteps of Lombardy and Milan, became independent and
part of the plurilingual Swiss confederation in 1803. With the opening of the Gotthard
railway in 1882, the region became a crossroads between North and South, and gained
economic prosperity especially after the Second World War. The economic boom led to
the migration of people from remote valleys to the urban areas of Lugano and Chiasso.
Today, the Ticinese dialects, which generally share linguistic features of the Lombard
system, tend to lose ground to Italian, not unlike the dialects of Italy’s regions. At the
same time German language presence is considerable, and many Ticinese regionalisms
can be explained by this language contact (for example, azione from German Aktion
‘sales promotion’; organizzazione tetto from German Dachorganization ‘umbrella
organization’). North of the Alps, one comes across a bureaucratic variety of Italian—
which Berruto (1984) called Helvetic Italian, with calques such as vuotatura from
German Leerung ‘mail collection’—as well as the use of Italian as a structurally
Entries A–Z 429
simplified lingua franca among foreign workers (due to the large numbers of Italian
immigrants in the 1960s). Italian is also spoken in the Mesolcina, Calanca, Poschiavo and
Bregaglia valleys of the neighbouring Grisons, where German and Rhaetoromansh are
the major languages. Unlike the dynamic sociolinguistic situation of the Ticino, the triple
minority status of Italian in this region contributes to steady erosion.
Italian also had in the past a strong presence in Corsica, one of the largest
Mediterranean islands north of Sardinia. The seven-century Pisan and Genoese rule in
Corsica was replaced in 1754 by the establishment of an autonomous yet short-lived
government under Pasquale Paoli, crushed in 1768 when Corsica became French. While
French became gradually the island’s official language, the former Italian dialects—with
a Tuscan base in the north and a south-central foundation in the south—were gradually
moulded into Corsican, with a written standard that was introduced as an optional school
subject in 1974. Corsican is recognized today by France as one of its languages. Among
the island’s 240,000 speakers, Italian tends by now to be but a remote echo.
In the multilingual Mediterranean island of Malta, located some fifty miles South of
Sicily, at the crossroad of East and West and of Christian and Islamic cultures, Italian
became the official language along with English during the political reorganization in the
nineteenth century. However, the British colonial rule was successful in assigning Italian
to secondary status, and in the 1932 constitution Maltese, a Siculo-Tunisian dialect based
on indigenous Arabic speech, was declared the official language together with English, a
contact situation resulting in strong interference from the latter.
See also: Italian language; Italian and emigration; minority languages
Further reading
Berruto, G. (1984) ‘Appunti sull’italiano elvetico’, Studi linguistici italiani 10:76–108.
Bianconi, S. (1989) I due linguaggi. Storia linguistics, della Lombardia dal ‘400 ai nostri giorni
(The Two Tongues: A Linguistic History of Lombardy from the Fifteenth Century to Today),
Bellinzona: Casagrande.
Goebl, H. (1988) ‘Korsisch, Italienisch und Französisch auf Korsika’ (Corsican, Italian and French
in Corsica), in G.Holtus, M.Metzeltin and C.Schmitt (eds), Lexikon der romantischen Linguistik
(Lexicon of Romance Linguistics), vol. 4, Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Hull, G. (1994) ‘Maltese from Arabic Dialect to European Language’, in I.Fodor and C.Hagège
(eds), Language Reform: History and Future, Hamburg: Buske.
Lurati, O. (1992) ‘Il Canton Ticino’ (The Canton Ticino), in F.Bruni (ed.), L’italiano delle regioni
(Italian in the Regions), Turin: UTET.
HERMANN W.HALLER
Italian phonology
The phonology of the Italian language consists of thirty generally agreed phonemes
(sounds which are capable of distinguishing pairs of words). There are seven vowels: i e ε
a ç o u. There are no nasal vowels. There are twenty-one consonants: p b m t d n
k g ts
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 430