Of all the Italian varieties, Romanesco is the one a learner has the best chance with. Centuries of proximity to the papal court sanded it down towards standard Italian, so it is not a separate lexicon to acquire. It is Italian with the endings gone and a different set of noises.

It is also the one you will meet most, because Rome exports its speech through film, television and football in a way no other Italian city does.

The two sounds

ahò: an attention-getter with no polite version and no real equivalent. It sits somewhere between hey, listen and excuse me, and it opens a very large share of Roman sentences.

aó: the shorter, sharper relative, used for calling across distance.

Neither can be said gently, and that is the point.

The word that conquered Italy

daje: come on, let's go, yes, do it. Pure Roman in origin, from dare, and now used across the whole country.

Its spread is traceable: football commentary carried it, and Francesco Totti carried the football. A word that was regional in the nineties is now what a Milanese teenager types when their team scores.

The pronunciation matters. It is two syllables, DA-je, and the j is a y. Getting it wrong is the fastest way to sound like you learned it from a subtitle.

The truncation rule

Romanesco cuts the ends off infinitives, and once you have the pattern you can decode most of it.

annà: andare, to go.

magnà: mangiare, to eat. Note the gn where standard Italian has ngi.

fa': fare, to do.

sta': stare, to be, to stay.

The definite article shifts too: er for il, which is why the dome of St Peter's is er Cupolone and why er appears in half the nicknames in Roman cinema.

And nun for non. Nun me frega is not indifference with a typo; it is Rome.

The vocabulary worth having

abbiocco: the heaviness and drowsiness that arrives after a large meal. Rome's gift to the national language, now understood everywhere, and untranslatable into English in fewer than eight words.

'na cifra: a huge amount, literally a figure. Me piace 'na cifra means I like it enormously.

pischello: a kid, a young lad. Mildly dismissive, mostly affectionate.

scialla: relax, take it easy, no stress. Younger register, and now spreading beyond Rome.

fregarsene: not to care, in the standard language but Roman in flavour and frequency. Me ne frego is a complete position.

bella: as a greeting. Bella! on its own, thrown across a street, means hello and approves of you at the same time.

sti cazzi: extremely common, extremely vulgar, and worth recognising rather than deploying. Depending on the tone it means either that is remarkable or I could not care less, which is a range that takes some getting used to.

The sonnets nobody mentions

Between 1830 and 1849, Giuseppe Gioachino Belli wrote 2,279 sonnets entirely in Romanesco, recording the speech of ordinary Romans with an accuracy no other Italian variety got at that period. Gogol admired them. They remain the single best record of what a European city actually sounded like in the nineteenth century.

That corpus is why Romanesco is unusually well documented for a spoken variety, and why claims about its history are checkable rather than folkloric.

Where you will hear it

Roman speech carries through Italian cinema in a way that shapes what foreigners think Italy sounds like. Alberto Sordi, Carlo Verdone and a long line of comedies put Romanesco in front of the whole country for decades.

It is also the variety most likely to appear in Italian series worth learning from, and the one that will most reward a learner who has done the twenty words above.

How to pick it up

Learn the truncation rule, not the individual verbs. Once annà, magnà and fa' have shown you the pattern, the rest of the infinitives come free.

Save the exclamations with their context. Ahò = hey is thin. Ahò, shouted by the man at the bar when someone walked in front of the queue teaches you the force as well as the meaning.

Give Translate the whole line. Truncated verbs and er for il will defeat word lookup entirely and reconstruct fine from a sentence.

The short version

Learn daje and say it correctly. Learn abbiocco, because you will experience it before you can name it. Learn the truncation rule and half of Romanesco decodes itself.

And if you want to know what Rome sounded like in 1835, Belli wrote it down, twice a week, for nineteen years.

Heard something in Rome with the end of the verb missing? Put the line into Vokabulo. Free to start on iPhone, iPad and in the browser. 🏛️