Italian Lesson – January 2025

Our lesson this month is more historical in nature rather than the traditional grammar/syntax format. While learning the Italian ancestral language has become the goal of many Italian Americans, learning about the languages of the ancestral homeland is an important component of reattaching to one’s ancestral roots. In this lesson readers may be surprised to learn Italy does not speak one language! To be clear, I am not referring to dialects, local accent or slang. I am talking about real languages. Italy, unknown to most, possibly has the richest linguistic diversity in the EU. It is also at the forefront of minority language protection.

Actual languages spoken and partly protected by law in Italy include:

• Italian (obviously).
• German (in South Tyrol)
• French (in Valle d’Aosta)\
• Occitanic (in the Western Piedmont valleys)
• Catalan (in Alghero, Sardinia)
• Sardinian (a language, not a dialect)
• Friuliano (a language, not a dialect)
• Slovenian (in selected towns and villages near Trieste)
• Ladin (a Romance language, also spoken in Swiss Grisons – a few valleys in South Tyrol)
• Cymbric (an old Teutonic dialect, a few villages in Central Alps)
• Greek (in three villages in Apulia)
• Albanian (in fairly large, scattered communities in Molise, Calabria and Sicily) These are the descendant languages of the Christian army who fled Albania in the 16th Century, after being defeated by the Turks)
• Rhaetian, (a Slavic dialect in a specific valley of the Friulian Alps)
• Walser or Titsch (a Germanic dialect in Valle d’Aosta)
• Croatian or “naš jezik” literally Croatian meaning “our tongue” (in three villages in Molise: Acquaviva Collecroce, Montemitro and San Felice).

The last of these diverse languages is one linguists might classify as a “hot potato” and it is not given the same status recognized by the Italian government as the aforementioned languages. Neapolitans, Venetians and some linguists would steadfastly insist that Neapolitan and Venetian are languages and not Italian dialects. However, these two “languages” are not covered by Law 482 enacted on Dec. 15, 1999, which has provisions to protect historical linguistic minorities. This law gave the Siculo or Calabro-Sicilian language spoken in Sicily and southern Calabria recognition as an autonomous Italian language, leaving Neapolitan
and Venetian classified as Italian dialects.

This month’s proverb
It is from the minority language of Friuliano.
Friulano: Un len sôl non fâs fûc.
Italiano: Un legno solo non fa fuoco.
English: literal meaning. “Wood alone does not make a fire.” Which is intended to mean “The more the better.”

This month’s falso amico
It is sentenza. In Italy the word is solely used in the legal sense as a sentence decreed in court, never as a sentence in the grammatical sense. In Italian, the word for sentence in a grammatical sense is “frase.” Frase in Italian can also mean phrase.