Italy has a language problem that no course mentions, and it starts with a number.
When Italy unified in 1861, the proportion of the population that actually spoke Italian was tiny. The most quoted estimate, from the linguist Tullio De Mauro, is around two and a half per cent. Standard Italian was a literary language, based on fourteenth-century Tuscan, that most Italians could not speak. What they spoke instead were the languages of their own regions.
Those languages did not come from Italian. They came from Latin, at the same time, along different roads.
Why calling them dialects is misleading
An English dialect is a variant of English. A Neapolitan or a Milanese is something else: a separate descendant of Latin that developed in parallel with Tuscan and would have been the national language had history gone differently.
il dialetto: the word Italians use, and it carries none of the dismissiveness the English word has picked up. Someone saying parlo il dialetto is not apologising.
l'italiano regionale: the more useful concept for a learner. This is standard Italian spoken with regional vocabulary, rhythm and constructions leaking in, and it is what you will actually hear. Almost nobody under fifty speaks pure dialect all day; almost everybody speaks regional Italian.
Rome: the one closest to standard
Romanesco is the easiest for a learner, because centuries of proximity to the papal court and Tuscan influence have pulled it towards the standard. It sounds like Italian with the corners knocked off.
daje: come on, let's go, yes. Now national, largely thanks to football, and unmistakably Roman in origin.
ahò: an attention-getter with no equivalent. Somewhere between hey and listen, and impossible to say politely.
er: the definite article il. Er Cupolone is what Romans call the dome of St Peter's.
Romanesco also truncates infinitives ruthlessly, so andare becomes annà and mangiare becomes magnà. The full treatment is in the Roman slang article.
Naples: the one with a literature
Napoletano has roughly five and a half million speakers, a written tradition going back centuries, and UNESCO recognition as a language in its own right.
guaglione: a boy, a lad. Shortened to guagliò when calling someone.
jamme: let's go. Familiar from Funiculì, Funiculà long before you knew it was Neapolitan.
mo': now. Compact and constant.
tene': to have. Neapolitan uses tenere for possession where standard Italian uses avere, exactly as Spanish does, and for the same reason: two and a half centuries of Spanish and Aragonese rule.
The full case is in the article on Neapolitan.
Milan and the north: the ones that lean towards France
The northern varieties belong to the Gallo-Italic group, which shares structural features with French and Occitan rather than with the south. This is why northern Italian speech sounds clipped to southern ears and why the vowels behave differently.
pirla: an idiot, mildly. The definitive Milanese insult and affectionate as often as not.
bauscia: a show-off, a boaster. Milanese, and used about Milan by everyone else.
michetta: the hollow bread roll of Milan. In Rome the same shape is a rosetta.
And Milan gave the country riocontra, the syllable-inversion slang covered in the opener to this series.
The food map, which is the practical part
The most immediately useful divergence for anyone living in Italy is that the same object has different names in different cities, and menus do not translate.
la michetta / la rosetta: the same roll, Milan and Rome.
il cornetto / la brioche: the breakfast pastry. Cornetto in Rome and the centre, brioche in the north and in Sicily, where it is also something else entirely.
l'anguria / il cocomero / il melone: watermelon, in the north, in Rome and in parts of the south respectively. Three words, one fruit, and the third is confusing because elsewhere it means melon.
What this means if you are learning
Learn standard Italian. It is the language of every institution and every written text and it will serve you everywhere.
But expect that in Naples the greengrocer's Italian will have Neapolitan underneath it, that in Milan the rhythm will be different, and that in Rome half the infinitives will have lost their endings. None of that is bad Italian. It is a country where the national language arrived recently and had to move in with the locals.
How to keep track
Save the city with the word. Anguria = watermelon is true in Milan and useless in Rome. The city is half the entry.
Give Translate the whole line. Regional Italian carries its identity in constructions and particles rather than in single words.
Then let repetition sort it. Regional vocabulary is high frequency exactly where you live, which is the fastest possible condition for moving words from passive to active.
The short version
The dialects are siblings of Italian, not versions of it. Daje in Rome, jamme in Naples, pirla in Milan.
And check which word for watermelon works where you are, before August.
Heard Italian that was not quite Italian? Put the line into Vokabulo with the city. Free to start on iPhone and iPad. 🇮🇹
