MY DIALECT AND ITS NEIGHBOURS

(Only for advanced learners of the Italian language)

I speak a dialect of the Italian language named Pesciatino. This name comes from the name of my city (or town), Pescia. It has an own name because it has not to be considered as Fiorentino (dialect of Florence ) or Lucchese (dialect of Lucca ).

It’s a kind of middle way between Lucchese and Pistoiese. Pistoiese is a minor form of Fiorentino. Anyway the influence of Pistoiese over Pesciatino is little and the rules, I’ll explain, can agree with Lucchese too.

Differences from the standard language

1. The biggest difference from the standard Italian language is the softening of the hard c:

The hard c is pronounced as English k

You can find it after a, o, u and h.

For speaking the standard Italian you have to spell it clearly and strong.

In the north-east Tuscan dialect it tends to get softer or to disappear totally.

For example we analyse the word ricordare (to remember): in this word c is hard and you have to pronounce as k]. In my dialect I have also to pronounce it hard, but the hardness is so strong that the c get soft. It doesn’t mean that hard c becomes sweet c [pronounced as ch in church], but that we pronounce the hard c as it were almost a breath between the two sides of the mouth, open for pronounced k.

Compare: ricordare in standard Italian  and ricordare in dialect

In Fiorentino the hard c get much softer, until it disappears totally from the word, as it were written riordare. A very little breath still remains between i and o, but the disappearance is much more marked than in my dialect:

Listen to this: ricordare

In Lucchese hard c get softer also, but very much less than Fiorentino o Pesciatino.

But this softening has not to be written. Also in dialectal works c was always written, because the softening is a pure matter of pronounce.

2. The second difference from the standard language is the shortening of the diphthong uo in o:

This diphthong is very common in the Italian language, you can find it often in many common words like vuoi (you want), buono (good), vuoto (empty), etc…

In almost all Tuscan dialects this diphthong is shortened in words like:

vuoi becomes vòi (with open o, to avoid confusion with voi [you all])

buono becomes bono

vuoto becomes vòto (with open o, to avoid confusion with voto [I vote])

and others

it’s a curious transformation, because all these words come from Latin words, which have not this diphthong, but the simple o:

we analyse the verb giocare (to play):

in Latin it was iocare, and in the ancient Tuscan dialect it was transformed in giuocare, with these transformation: i → gi and o → uo. In the modern dialect the 2^nd transformation has inverted: by the form giuocare, which we feel antiquate and snob, was born the form giocare, the new form, accepted by the Zanichelli Italian Dictionary.

Many words of the modern Italian standard language were born so from the antiquate medieval language with much more forms with -uo-, which became -o- in the modern language like giuocare/giocare.

Many Italian verbs have this diphthong like tuonare [to thunder]. In the dialectal speech coexist two forms of this verb: the standard tuonare and the dialectal tonare, with the same meaning.

Verbs like vuotare [to empty] in the standard language have to be written always with the diphthong in every form, to avoid confusion with votare [to vote]. In the dialectal speech this can create some confusion. The uo get shorter and the form coincide. The difference is o. In vòtare [to empty], o is always open, in votare [to vote], changes in according to the standard rules. Some forms coincide also with the accent, but the context will show you what is the correct meaning:

Hai vòtato il secchio? Did you empty the bucket? The forms coincide but it would be meaningless a sentence like Did you vote the bucket?

This transformation can be written, because it’s not only a matter of pronounce. In dialectal works you can find bono instead of buono, che vole? instead of che vuole?, etc…

3. Another difference is the fall of the final -o at the end of some verbal forms:

- at the end of the 3^rd person in the plural the ending becomes often -n, instead of -no:

voglion instead of vogliono [they want], perdòn instead of perdòno [they lose]. Attention: fan instead of fanno, han instead of hanno, van instead of vanno are largely used forms.

- the form sono of the verb essere [to be] gets shorter: son

This losing can be found in dialectal works and must be written to express it.

This dialectal losing belongs most of all to Lucchese, and it influenced Pesciatino. In the western Tuscan dialects, as Fiorentino, o tends to remain in the end of the over read words.

4. Another big difference is the fall of the final -re of the infinitives of the verbs:

andare → andà

perdere → pèrde

finire → finì

It’s a process similar to what happened in the French language: verbs like aimer should be read [emè] with the losing of the final -r.

You can understand that these forms are infinitives because the accent don’t move on the new last syllable but one, as it should do, but still remains on its old syllable; so the sound of the infinitive isn’t lost, and a Tuscan speaker can recognize what verbal form it is.

This losing should be written because isn’t only a matter of pronounce but a real morphological change.

You can hear this losing in about all Tuscany . From the eastern Tuscan dialects as Viareggino and Pisano, to western Tuscan dialect as Fiorentino or Chiantigiano, the fall of -re is a largely diffused and typical phenomenon of Tuscan dialects; in the other regions is very common to drop the -re or to soften the c’s for making examples of the Tuscan dialects.

5. Another famous difference is the doubling of the dative of the personal pronouns.

The most famous Tuscan sentence for this in the other Italian regions is A me mi piace.

English translation is I like it. The correct Italian sentences are A me piace or Mi piace. If you know how the verb piacere works, you know that the object you like is the subject in Italian, and you are the dative of the sentence. As you saw, for expressing the dative you can use the form a me or the form mi.

You can use both of them, and it’s perfectly useless to use both of them together in the standard Italian.

In all western Tuscan dialects and many eastern dialects it’s common to use both of them to make the dative stronger. You can make it with all personal pronouns: it’s easy to find forms like:

A te ti piace (You like it), A noi ci sembra (it seems to us), etc…

In the dialectal works this feature was naturally written because it’s a grammatical matter. This form was even used by Alessandro Manzoni in his masterpiece “I promessi sposi” one of the most famous works of the Italian literature.

Sometimes you can find the doubling of the dative also with a personal pronoun and a substantive or a name, but only in highly dialectalized speeches:

A Mark gli piace (in English it would sound He Mark likes it), the correct sentence is: A Mark piace

6. Another characteristic feature of all Tuscan dialects is the falling of the adjectival ending of the possessive adjectives:

This phenomenon happens to the first three persons:

Mio, mia, miei, mie are the declined forms of the first person singular possessive adjective. All these forms are shortened in mi’, with the falling of -o, -a, -ei, -e. So you can hear sentences like these ones:

La mi’ mamma instead of more correct la mia mamma (my mum), i mi’ parenti instead of i miei parenti (my relatives).

This happens also to tuo and suo:

Tuo, tua, tuoi, tue become tu’

Suo, sua, suoi, sue become su’

All these shortened forms can create confusion with the other similar particle mi (dative personal pronoun: to me), tu (first personal pronoun subject: singular you), and su (preposition: over, on), but a Tuscan speaker can always recognize what is the real meaning the other speaker wants to transmit.

This phenomenon looks similar to what created the Spanish possessive adjectives: mi/mis, tu/tus, su/sus.

7. Another big feature is the use of the impersonal Si.

If you are an advanced learner of the Italian language, you already know how to use the impersonal Si. As you know, sometimes the impersonal Si can replace the personal pronoun noi: this can happens in standard Italian only when the meaning of noi is indefinite enough.

Si parla inglese qui → Noi parliamo inglese qui - We speak English/English spoken

In the Tuscan dialects, especially the western ones and Fiorentino, this phenomenon get much wider than Italian. It tends to replace always the personal pronoun noi and to make disappear the 1^st person plural form of the verbs. In fact the impersonal Si needs the 3^rd person singular form for its verb. So it’s common to hear the impersonal Si instead of the pronoun noi, every time this one should appear:

Si va a casa? → Andiamo a casa? (Do we go home?)

Si vorrebbe… → Vorremmo (We would like…)

S’è partiti presto → Siamo partiti presto (We left early)

S’è voluto farlo→ Abbiamo voluto farlo (We wanted to do it)

The substitution of noi with si takes with itself the use of essere as auxiliary verb, even with a verb which regularly needs avere as auxiliary verb, and the past participle in the composed tenses must agree with the subject after its genre and number if the verbs regularly needs essere as auxiliary verb, but it must not agree if the auxiliary verb regularly would be avere.

The only forms which is not substituted is the 1^st person plural in the indicative present:

Noi siamo doesn’t tend to be substituted by s’è, because we feel it too much erroneous, but only when essere means “to be”. When essere works as auxiliary verbs or when it means like “there is…”, it can be substituted by Si + 3^rd person, as seen in the previous examples.

8. A little feature is the shortening of the 1^st singular persons in the present of the verbs andare [to go] and fare [to do].

They are very irregular verbs, and in standard Italian their 1^st singular person are vado [from the form vado from the Latin verb vadere, to go] and faccio [from the form facio from the Latin verb facere, to do].

The continuous wear of these forms during the centuries created two shorter forms for them:

Vò instead of vado

Fò instead of faccio

This process looks similar to what created the highly irregular forms of the verb avere, because its Latin correspondent habere was perfectly regular.

These forms are original of all north Tuscan dialects, and they were born about some centuries ago, after the regular forms were taken from the ancient Latin form, as seen above. The standard Italian forms were accepted by Senese, and other south Tuscan dialects, while in north Tuscan dialects they kept on transforming themselves until the forms vo and fo appeared.

Ancient dialectal aspects which are disappearing

1. As seen above, the forms for the verb “to go” were adapted from the Latin verbs vadere [to go] and probably from annare [to swim across..], to form the irregular verb andare.

This happened in south and in east Tuscan dialects, like Fiorentino and Senese. So, when the Italian language was born the form andare was accepted to express “to go”.

But in Latin, neither vadere nor annare were used to say “to go”. Latin language used the verb ire. No tracks of this verb remained in the modern language, except for the derived forms of its Latin compounds, like uscire [to exit, to go out] from exire [the English verb and substantive exit is only the 3^rd singular person of the present of this verb!]. This happened because Fiorentino and Senese did not use anymore this verb when they developed.

But the west Tuscan dialect still kept on using this verb along. So my dialect, Lucchese, and mountain dialects still preserve some forms of this archaic verb, even if nowadays it’s not anymore used, only old people sometimes still use it.

Not all forms of the verb are known, only a few forms are known because they were written. The other have never been found in literary dialectal works. We show the conjugation of this verb: so written forms * are not attested form but only reconstructed.

2. The second ancient aspect is three forms of the verb essere.

These are very dialectal forms and only old people use them. In standard Italian language they are considered as big errors.

These are the dialectal forms:

Enno instead of 3^rd singular person verbal form sono in the present.

Eramo instead of 1^st plural person verbal form eravate in the imperfect.

Erate instead of 2^nd plural person verbal form eravate in the imperfect.

The last two forms are naturally shortenings of the real forms, which were used by lower class people because they were easier and shorter than the regular forms.

The first form is a real alternative form, which etymology is nowadays still unknown.

These forms belongs most of all to Lucchese, and influenced the old Pesciatino.

Modern modifications of Pesciatino

As you surely know, a language or a dialect is not fixed in time. They were born and they developed, but their evolution have not finished. They keep on developing also nowadays and still change themselves.

Also my dialect, also if it’s disappearing, cancelled by standard Italian, is developing with new dialectal forms, which make it still more different from standard Italian.

1. One of the newest modification is the falling of -ato.

-ato is the ending of the past participle for the 1^st conjugation. As you know, to build the past participle you have to drop the infinitive ending (-are), and add this ending:

chiamare [to call] → chiam - are → chiam + ato → chiamato [called]

This process was used also in Pesciatino and in all its neighbours. But recently, influenced by the new SMS and chat language, which has to be short and direct, someone started to use a new shorter past participle ending:

The -ato falls and the new ending is -o:

chiamato → chiam - ato → chiam + o → chiamo

This form perfectly corresponds with the 1^st singular person present form of every 1^st conjugation verb. This could be create some confusion but it doesn’t happens because we use this shortened past participle only in composed tenses, with the auxiliary verb:

ho chiamo instead of ho chiamato. Here chiamo can only be the new form of past participle, it would have no sense if it were the 1^st singular person in the present.

If the past participle is used as an adjective, it is not shortened.

The 2^nd and 3^rd conjugations’ past participle do not get shorter, because it would not sound good for the Italian language and for our dialects.

2. Another modification is the changing of non in un.

This modification happens under an influence of the Roman dialect over our speech. It has always been common to use un as negation in the dialect of Rome , and in the last years we adopted this way of negating verbs.

Non lo voglio → Un lo voglio [I don’t want it]

This seems to be a complication for a stranger, because it seems one of the indefinite articles (un), but we can recognize it, because we place it just like non as negation, and so it could be only the negation.

The dialectal situation in northern Tuscany

As I already wrote in the first lines of this chapter my dialect, named Pesciatino, is a fusion between Lucchese and Pistoiese. But where are these dialects?

Northern Tuscany is characterized by the Arno valley, which occupies it entirely. This valley is also divided in three other smaller valleys: from east to west: the Valley of Florence , the valley of Ombrone , and the Valdinievole; east of Valdinievole, which is my valley, there is the Valley of Serchio , river of Lucca . The valley of Serchio spreads until the coast, whose name is Versilia, from Pisa to Massa-Carrara. Under Pisa there is the city of Livorno .

The dialectal situation is clear enough, each lesser valley has its own dialect: In valley of Florence it’s spoken Fiorentino [speech of Florence], in valley of Ombrone Pistoiese [from the name of its capital city, Pistoia], in Valdinievole it’s spoken Pesciatino [also named Valdinievolese], in valley of Serchio Lucchese [speech of Lucca], which is spoken also in the mounts near Lucca. On the coast the situation is a little different: in all Versilia it’s spoken Versiliese or Viareggino dialect [from the name of the city Viareggio ], a form of Lucchese mixed with Pisan dialect and Massa ’s dialect. Under the Arno there is Pisano, the dialect of Pisa, which spreads toward south, but by getting always farer from the coast, because on the coast south of Pisa it’s spoken Livornese, dialect of Livorno, which is spoken in a strict band very close to the coast, surrounded by Pisano. These two dialect are spoken almost until the provincial bonders, where Southern Tuscan dialects are spoken.

Southern Dialects are Senese (which is claimed to be the “mother speech of the Italian language”), speech of Siena, Aretino-Chianaiolo, speech of Arezzo and of the zone, which is named Chianti, Grossetano, speech of Grosseto, and Maremmano, spoken in the large plain of Maremma in the deep south of Tuscany. These dialects are a bit different from the Northern ones, they seem to be much closer linguistically to the standard Italian, because they have not some features of the Northern dialects.

There is another dialect in Tuscany , Massese, speech of Massa , a city near Viareggio . We cannot speak about this dialect among the other Tuscan dialects, because it belongs to another dialectal family. Massese belongs to the Gallo-Italic dialects, and it looks like the dialects, which are spoken in Emilia-Romagnaand in Liguria . It adsorbed not very much from the Tuscan dialects and it’s still different from them.

The role which Tuscan dialects play in the dialectal situation in Italy

A linguistic analysis of the Tuscan speech

The modern dialectal forms of the Tuscan speech are nowadays a reality, which is known in the entire national territory.

Just like the Italian language, a speaker of a northern, central or southern dialect can easily understand a Tuscan speaker, while it’s difficult that a Tuscan speaker understands the others.  Even if they also keep their distance from the standard Italian, the Tuscan speeches are the closest dialectal forms to the standard one, more than the other dialects, which look more like separated languages.  

The biggest point of misunderstanding of the Tuscan dialects is the vocabulary, which, as natural, presents a local terminology, which a speaker, who does not live in the Tuscan zone, cannot know.

But by the morphological, syntactical, and phonological viewpoint a Tuscan dialect can be understood in all Italy with only a few problems. However also by level of vocabulary, many Tuscan terms are known in the rest of Italy and they’re used as “free” terms. This phenomenon has its causes in the diffusion of the standard Italian, which brought with itself many Tuscan terms. This is the situation of standard Italian at the beginning of its diffusion.

In fact, as already said, standard Italian did not assert over the other dialects, by eliminating them (this was the aim of the philologists which “created” this language), but it came alongside with the other dialects, which people already used colloquially in all Italy. So, slowly, each inhabitants became bilingual, because he can express himself both in the family environment and with his fellow-citizens with his dialect, and he can speak standard Italian to comunicate with other people in his nation, that did not know his dialect (except for Tuscan people, which did not regard themselves as bilingual, because they felt standard Italian as a version of their own dialect).  

So we can say that Italian asserted itself as “lingua franca” for the communications among the various zones of Italy , before it became a language, spoken by everyone, and it did not assert by the first steps as national language from its birth.

Tuscan dialects naturally cannot take this function, because they are dialects, i.e. strictly regional speeches, that are limited to zones, which are lesser than the same Tuscany . But they were dragged by the diffusion of the standard Italian in a particular situation. In fact, even if people out of Tuscany do not speak these dialects, these speakers can easily understand them, in spite of the morphological, syntactical and phonetical differences with the standard Italian.  

All Italian people can understan a sentence like “Il mi’ babbo”, in spite of its difference with the Italian “Mio padre” [my father]. Differences which happen in Tuscan speeches (fall of -o of mio, and utilisation of the term babbo inside of padre, which brought the utilisation of the definite article) do not cause a total or partial misunderstanding, as it can happens in other dialects.

Phonetics have certainly helped the easy understanding of Tuscan dialects. Dialectal phonetics in fact is almost exactly the same as standard Italian, and this makes easy the understanding of similar but not equal words between standard Italian and Tuscan dialects.

The Tuscan dialect is, in this period of its life, one of the most lively and vital of the Italian dialects. Unlike many other dialects, whose specific forms condemned them to a continuous regression in favour of the standard Italian, the particular form of the Tuscan dialects allows them to stay alive. Even if they endured a kind of regression for the standard Italian too, they kept on being independent and lively.

The other Italian dialects were, in fact, confined to the level of speeches for ignorant people or of speeches for typical folklorist songs, as napoletano or Neapolitan (speech of Naples ), very appreciated for the musical utilisation, but usually not appreciated in the common speech out of Naples . Romano or Roman (speech of Rome ) dialect is often used in cinematographic field for visualizing a rough person, and the milanese or Milan dialect for visualizing the idea of snob. Siciliano or Sicilian speech is usually used for visualizing the image of the “mafia”, because Sicily has always been the fatherland of the mafia, and for the complexity of the same dialect. Other Italian dialects don’t find any applications in any musical or cinematographic fields for their own characterization.

Dialects out of Tuscany have anyway nowadays a defect: they don’t keep on evolving anymore. They tend to flow together in the standard Italian, but this is not a necessary evolution, but a flattening of the dialectal vitality in favour of the normal communicative language. The Tuscan dialects has still nowadays this particularity, which is saving it, so it can still keep on evolving.

In fact, it seems that the Tuscan dialects kept the natural way of the evolution that the standard Italian language should have kept. The standard Italian, in fact, as each modern spreading language, is almost crystallized. Very applied by the mass-media, and strictly controlled by grammatical rules, the standard Italian is a language, whose evolutive travel has almost stopped, only the assimilation of new scientific or english terms keeps it lively.

The generical Tuscan has kept the evolving way of the standard Italian and keeps on evolving by itself, as, maybe, it should be evolving the Italian language without fixed rules.

In fact, as we have already seen, in the Tuscan dialects some fonetic-morphological processes happened, or are happening, which show their evolution. Some processes are similar to those which have already happened in other romance languages in their way of separation from the Latin, as the fall of the desinence of the genre in the possessive adjectives (mi’ instead of mio/mia/miei/mie, tu’ instead of tuo, su’ instead of suo), that is the same which created the possessive adjectives in Spanish, or the modern fall of the past particle infix -at- as, maybe, it happened in the old French and bore the modern past participles.

So, the Tuscan dialect is applying now the evoluting processes which other languages have applied in the past. These processes are happening now because, probabily, the Tuscan dialects are spoken in Italy, zone of birth of the Latin language, which during the medieval and Renaissance centuries kept on being the written language par excellence, and it kept on influencing the Tuscan dialects; also the Tuscan dialects bore a litterary tradition enough late on the contrary with the other european languages and so it had less time to evolve. While other languages were already stabilized, the modern Italian was born by the Tuscan dialects; the modern Italian can be considered as a form of united Tuscan. Nowadays the Tuscan dialects keep on evolving while the standard Italian is still evolving but more slowly.