Italian dialects and languages: a guide

“A language is a dialect with an army and navy.”— Max Weinreich, sociolinguist and Yiddish scholar

Did you know that Italy is incredibly rich in terms of dialects and languages?

You may be wondering what the difference between a language and a dialect is.

Well, a dialect is a variety of a language that people speak in a particular part of a country, usually containing some different words and grammar.

Normally, dialects of the same language are considered to be mutually intelligible (can be understood easily), while different languages are not.

The official language of Italy

The official language of the Republic of Italy is Italian, historically known as the ‘literary Tuscan’, used by renowned writers such as Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio during the XIII century.

Curiously enough, Italian as we know i was only used by a small minority before Italy and was unified in 1861. 

Up until that moment, Italy included and still includes a myriad of dialects that derive from Latin, Greek, Albanian, Slavic and Germanic languages.

Let’s have a look at what other languages/dialects are spoken in Italy, and in which of the 20 regions we can find them.

What are the main dialects spoken in Italy?

Each dialect or language comes with a variety of sounds and words that differ from region to region.

In most cases, people in the North tend to pronounce the vowels e and o with an open sound rather than closed; this can become confusing for words such as pesca (peach – the correct diction here is pèsca [open e] like in caffè) or pesca (fishing – the correct diction here is pésca [closed e], like in perché). 

People from the centre of Italy tend to have a diction closer to the ‘original’ pronunciation of the Italian language that derived from Tuscany, which is also the Italian form of language taught for acting in theatre or cinema. 

In the South, the situation is usually reversed: open vowels become closed, and closed ones become open.

Keep in mind that each region also has different dialects; that means that people may not understand one another even if they come from the same region!

The funny bit is that some dialects/languages are completely different to Italian; this is normally the case for southerners from Apulia, Campania, Sicily, Sardinia, or northerners from Lombardy, Piedmont or Aosta Valley. Their dialects/languages are so different that it is often impossible to understand what is being discussed, unless you are from the same area.

This concludes our mini-trip to Italy and its many regions!