This article, written by GAETANO CIPOLLA, first appeared in Italics Magazine. 

THE STIGMA OF SPEAKING A DIALECT: THE CASE OF SICILIAN

With the establishment of Florentine as the literary language of choice, all the other regional languages came to be regarded as dialects, creating a unique situation that Italians have struggled with to this day.

In the performance of my academic duties, I was often called to advise students who wanted to study Italian. When I inquired whether they had some knowledge of Italian, some of them admitted somewhat sheepishly that they knew what they characterized as ‘bad Italian’. Knowing that Sicilian immigrants represent 40/50% of the Italian American population in the U.S., that ‘bad Italian’ often turned out to be Sicilian. But Sicilian is not the only ‘dialect’ that was classified by my students as being ‘bad Italian’. Neapolitan, Barese, Calabrian, Molisan, to name a few southern Italian ‘dialects’, are characterized as corruptions of Italian, inferior linguistic expressions without beauty or grace, so much so that they can only exist in the confines of one’s home, away from the ears of outsiders who might form a negative impression on the dialectal speaker’s worth.

The embarrassment displayed by these students as they admitted to understanding or even speaking such idioms was a constant source of amazement to me, as well as anger, that I put aside quickly as I attempted to encourage them to consider the linguistic skills they had acquired as an asset rather than a liability, a help not a stumbling block to learning Italian. Inevitably, however, I reflected on the long and tortured road that the so-called Italian dialects have traveled through the centuries, “losing a chord every day” to use Ignazio Buttitta’s famous poem Lingua e dialettu, chased out of the classroom by intransigent teachers (“don’t say racina, that’s Sicilian dialect. The correct Italian word is uva!”), forbidden to appear in public by a dictatorial regime, vilified as a poor and unwelcome relative, wrongly accused of being a poor tool in the hands of an unskilled artisan, and unwelcome in government offices and among polite society.

For this reason, to bolster students’ confidence, I told them that Sicilian is not really a dialect, but another language… Continue reading at ItalicsMag.com.

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