Check Out Torrese

Torrese is the Neapolitan dialect spoken on the Italian coast 10 miles southeast of Naples. This is a port city with a very unique dialect. The hardcore Torrese does not even appear to be completely intelligible in Torre del Greco 5 miles to the north or in Castellamare di Stabia 5 miles to the south.

The video above, apparently from Naples TV, is making the rounds with Italians on Youtube, mostly because no one seems to be able to understand what these women are saying. For sure, this is one wild, over the top dialect all right.

There are also a lot of comments about people who can’t even speak proper Italian, about low-class, slummy, scummy, uneducated people, and about the slums of Naples. It’s true that the Naples region has a lot of run-down housing, especially in suburbs. There is also a tremendous amount of corruption, and the Camorra, or the local Mafia, is simply everywhere. They have even heavily infiltrated the police. For a while there, trash was piling up all over Naples because no one wanted to collect the garbage.There is not a lot of random violent crime, but there is a lot of property crime. Be careful even parking your car on the streets.

The women in the video are apparently complaining about cockroaches in their building. They appear to be saying that they are as big as rats, which is dubious.

The “Southern Question” has long been a problem of Italian politics. It’s a question that is heavily tinged with the racism that Northern Italians feel towards Southern Italians. A frequent comment, along the lines of “Africa begins at the Pyrenees,” is, “Africa begins in Naples.” Northern Italians often say that Naples is part of Africa. Southerners are said to be criminal, rude, belligerent, hot-tempered, violent, corrupt, stupid, uneducated and poor. In addition, they can’t even speak proper Italian.

Drawing a line at where the South begins is difficult, but an argument can even be made that Abruzze is southern in culture. Where Rome fits is anyone’s guess. Perhaps a more proper division is North, Center and South Italy.

The Southern Question shows no sign of resolution in my lifetime.

Check Out Romanesco

Romanesco is the Italian dialect or language of Rome and the surrounding area. This Youtube video took Italy by storm. It is called “Girls of Ostia Beach – Interview in Dialect.” The announcer interviews two teenage girls on the beach in Rome for about 1 1/2 minutes.

Their dialect was so strong that those who made the video had to put subtitles on it because many Italians couldn’t understand any of the dialogue otherwise. So you see, even the dialect of Rome is unintelligible in much of Italy.

This is interesting because Rome and its province of Latium and Tuscany are the two parts of Italy where the old dialects are the most far gone. Here they are heavily diluted and Italianized, reduced in many cases from full languages to mere dialects of Italian. But as you can see in this video, the hard dialect of Rome is still alive and well.

The video caused a storm all over Italy but especially in Rome. Many people, especially Romans, were outraged at the girls’ dialect, which they felt was coarse, rude, vulgar and low class. They compared it to the speech of the ghetto or to uneducated idiots. The truth is that this is just hardcore Romanesco dialect from the center of Rome, not from the suburbs or surrounding villages.

Many older Romans were outraged at what the video said about their beautiful Roman dialect. They longed for the “pure and elegant” Romanesco of 50 years ago, now kept alive by the elderly.

Many said that this was not Romanesco at all but instead was Romanaccio, a so-called rude street form of the “true and glorious” Romanesco. The truth is that what you hear in the video is the language of quite a few Roman youth today. And indeed it is quite a bit different from the hardcore Romanesco now spoken by the older folks.

Even if you can’t understand Italian, if you listen to the dialect and try to compare it to the subtitles, you can see that the speech bears little resemblance to the subtitled words.

I don’t speak Italian, but I kind of liked the sound of this dialect. Has kind of a wild sound to it. And the girls are pretty nice to look at.

Check Out Siculo Gallo-Italic

These are fascinating Romance dialects spoken in Sicily. The are called the Gallo-Italic dialects of Sicily. Some of them are also found in other parts of Italy, mostly in the far south in Basilicata.

Gallo-Italic languages are spoken in far north of Italy and are so called because there is heavy French influence on these Italian varieties. They include Venetian, East and West Lombard, Piedmontese, Ligurian, Emilian and Romagnolo.

In the 1100′s and 1200′s, Sicily was ruled by Norman rulers from the north of France. They had conquered much of Italy, and were in control of parts of the north also. In order perhaps to consolidate their rule in Sicily, which they had just conquered, they sent some Norman soldiers to Sicily to help populate the region and set up Norman outposts there.

These were mostly soldiers from the southern Piedmont (Monferrate)  and Ligurian (Oltregiogo) regions of Italy and from the Provencal area in the south of France. There were also a few from the Lombard region and other parts of northern Italy. They went down there with their families and formed a number of settlements in Sicily and a few other places in Italy.

Over the next 800 years, their Gallo-Italic language came under heavy influence of varieties of Sicilian in Sicily, Basilicatan in Basilicata and other languages in other parts of Italy. Yet the heavy Gallo-Italic nature of their lects remains to this day and Sicilian speakers of surrounding villages find Gallo-Italic speakers impossible to understand.

The dialects have tended to die out somewhat in the past 100 years. Villagers were tired of speaking a language that could not be understood outside the village and increasingly shifted to the Sicilian language. A situation of bilingualism in Gallo-Italic and Sicilian developed. Over time, this became trilingualism as children learned Standard Italian in school. Gallo-Italic was used inside the village itself, and Sicilian was used for communication with outsiders.

Whether or not Gallo-Italic lects in different parts of Sicily can understand each other is not known, but they have all undergone independent paths of development over 800 years or so. The same is also an up in the air question about Basilicatan Gallo-Italic and Gallo-Italic settlements in other parts of the country. This is an interesting question in need of linguistic research.

In this 1 1/2 minute video, I am not sure if I understood a single word he said. The language he is speaking sounds like a mixture of Provencal Piedmontese with a heavy dose of Sicilian. Sicilian itself is so odd that a Sicilian speaker can barely be understood at all outside of Sicily. It has at least 250,000 words, 25% of which have no equivalent in Standard Italian. It underwent heavy French, Spanish and especially Greek and Arabic influences.

Mutual Intelligiblility in the Romance Family (Reading)

Just a personal anecdote. I have been reading a lot of Italian lately (with the help of Google Translate). I already read Spanish fairly well. I have studied French, Portuguese and Italian, and I can read Portuguese and French to some extent, Portuguese better than French.

But I confess that I am quite lost with Italian. This is worse than French and worse than Portuguese. A couple weeks of wading through this stuff hasn’t made me understand it any better.

Portuguese and Galician are said to be so close that they are a single language. I don’t agree with that at all, but they are very close, much closer to Spanish and Portuguese. Intelligibility may be on the order of 80-90%.

Nevertheless, the other day I tried to read a journal article on Galician. It looked like it was written in Portuguese, and who would write in Galician anyway? I copied the whole thing into Google Translate and let it ride. I waded through the whole article, and I must say it was a disaster. I had a very hard time understanding many of the main points of the article.

Then I remembered that Translate works on Galician now, so I decided on an off chance that the guy may have written the piece in Galician for some nutty reason. I ran it through Translate using Galician as target. The article went through perfectly. You could understand the whole thing. It was then that I realized how far apart Portuguese and Galician really are.

You can try some other experiments.

Occitan is said to be nearly intelligible with Spanish or maybe even French, better if you know both. There’s no Google Translate for Occitan yet, but I had to deal with a lot of Occitan texts recently. I couldn’t make heads or tails of them despite by Romance reading background. So I tried using Translate to turn them into Spanish or French. French was a total wreck, and there was no point even bothering with that. Spanish was much better, but even that was a serious mess.

Now we come to the crux. Catalan and Occitan are said to be so close that they are nearly one language. Translate now works in Catalan. So I ran the Occitan texts through Translate using Catalan. The result was a serious mess, but you could at least understand some of what the Occitan texts were about. But no way on Earth were those the same languages.

People keep saying that if you can read Spanish, you can read Portuguese. It’s not true, but you can see why people say it. Try this. Take a Spanish text and run it through Translate using the Portuguese filter. Now take a Portuguese text and run it through Translate using the Spanish filter. See what a mess you end up with!

Despite the fact that I can read Spanish pretty well, I have tried to read texts in Aragonese, Asturian, Extremaduran, Leonese and Mirandese. These are so close that some even say that they are dialects of Spanish. But even if you read Spanish, you can’t really read any of those languages, and they are all separate languages, I assure you. Sure, you get some of it, but not enough, and it’s a very frustrating experience.

There are texts on the Net in something called Churro or Xurro. It’s a Valencian-Aragonese transitional dialect spoken around Teruel in Aragon in Spain. It also has a lot of Old Castillian and a ton of regular Castillian in it. Wikipedia will tell you it’s a Spanish dialect. Running it through both the Spanish and Catalan filters didn’t work and ended up with train wrecks. I doubt if Xurro is a dialect of either Catalan or Spanish. It’s probably a separate language.

There is another odd lect spoken in the same region called Chappurriau. It is spoken in Aguaviva in Teruel in the Franca Strip. The Catalans say these people speak Catalan, but the speakers say that their language is not Catalan. Intelligibility with Catalan is said to be good. So effectively this is a Catalan dialect.

I found some Chappurriau texts on the Net and ran them through Translate using Catalan as the output. The result was an unreadable disaster, and I couldn’t really figure out what they were saying. Then I tried the Spanish filter, and that was even worse. I am starting to think that maybe Chappurriau is a separate language as its speakers say and not a Catalan dialect after all.

I conclude that the ability to cross read across the Romance languages is much exaggerated.

Not only that, but many Romance microlanguages, transitional dialects and lects that are supposedly dialects of larger languages may actually be separate languages.

Check Out Ormeasco

Ormeasco is a very strange dialect of spoken in the far northwest of Italy in Piedmont Province near the border with Liguria Province near the French border in the Ligurian Alps.

It is a dialect of the Ligurian language. It is basically a Brigasco Ligurian dialect with heavy South Cuneo Piedmontese influences. There are also strong French influences via Piedmontese and Occitan borrowings via Brigasco. It is so strange that even residents of nearby villages have a hard time understanding it. Ormeasco has been studied by linguists for over 150 years since it is so unusual.

In the video, apparently made for a Piedmontese TV station, the announcer is apparently speaking Italian, though she may be speaking with a Piedmontese accent, which is a pretty wack accent of Italian. The persons interviewed are speaking Ormeasco. If you listen to the Ormeasco, you can see that it almost sounds more French than Italian.

I really get tired of hearing people say that Spanish and Italian are intelligible with each other. Italian speakers who travel to Colombia say they had a very hard time being understood. Colombians understand no more than 30-40% of what they were saying.

Now, as far as the Italian speaker in this video, let me tell you how much of her language I can understand: 0%! If you have any knowledge of French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, you might find this video interesting. See if you can understand any of it.

I must say though, that sure is a beautiful little Italian village!

Fala, A Galician-Portuguese Language of Spain

Three videos showcase Fala, a Galician-Portuguese language spoken in the Xalima Valley in Spain in Caceres near the Portuguese border. All evidence indicates that this is a dialect of Galician from a movement of Galicians to the area in the 1300′s.

Subsequently, the group became isolated from the rest of the Galician population and the lect underwent independent development, especially strong influence from Asturian-Leonese in the form of the Extremaduran language. So we have an archaic Galician dialect with strong Extremaduran influence. Presently, Castillian speakers say they are completely lost listening to this language.

Portuguese speakers fare better, but intelligibility is not full even for them. However, there is full intelligibility with the Galician language spoken in the northwest of Spain.

Oddly enough, about 95% of the residents of this rustic valley continue to speak this language, from elders all the way down to young children. Everyone is bilingual in Castillian, which is learned in school. Castillian is used with outsiders; Fala is used with residents among themselves.

Recent attempts were made to adopt the Galician standard for writing Fala but these were rejected by Fala speakers as the Galician standard is not close to what they speak. As far as what protection Fala has, this is uncertain. Certainly it is not an official language of Spain as Galician is, and it is probably not included in the Galician as official standard.

The first video is a very well done documentary on the language. If you cover up the subtitles, it’s almost impossible to make sense of what they are speaking.

In the second video, there are no subtitles, and the language is quite incomprehensible. The narrator appears to be speaking Fala, but he may be speaking a more watered down version of it. I could understand some of what he was saying but certainly not all of it. The Castillian man he interviews is much more intelligible.

The last video is apparently of two Fala-speaking women who are being interviewed. They are apparently responding in Fala. The first time I watched this video I was lost. I have since watched it a few more times, and I can now pick up some of what she is saying. Notice that the language has a strong Portuguese flavor. I am not sure what language the narrator is speaking to them in. Possibly Castillian?

The narrator somehow seems to understand them although he is not a Fala speaker. He says he is a speaker of Bierzo Leonese spoken in the Bierzo region of Leon near the Galician border. This Leonese lect borders on a Galician dialect (Berciano) spoken to the west in the same province.

Bierzo Leonese has strong Galician influence, and Berciano Galician has heavy Leonese influence. Berciano Galician is doing quite well, but Bierzo Leonese is not doing so well, as is the case with the Leonese language across the board.

If you speak Spanish, Portuguese or both, see how well you can understand Fala.

The Portuguese Language in Spain

Very interesting documentary about a variety of Galician-Portuguese lects spoken in Spain along the border with Portugal.

The first lect is Oliventino, spoken in the town of Olivenza in Bajadoz near the Portuguese border. It is an archaic Alentejan Portuguese dialect that dates back from 1801, when Portugal lost control of the area to Spain. Portugal continues to claim the town, but Spain won’t give it back. In the interim, Oliventino has been heavily influenced by Extremaduran Spanish. Standard Portuguese speakers are typically lost with Oliventino.

The language is now spoken by those older than 60 years old and is apparently not being passed on to children. There are few to no young speakers.

In Alcantara in Caceres and Bajadoz,  several archaic Portuguese lects are spoken. They are close to Alentejan Portuguese.

In Herrera de Alcántara in Caceres, an ancient Portuguese from the 1200′s called Firrerenho is spoken. This area was made part of Spain in 1297.

In Cedillo and Valencia de Alcántara in Caceres, an archaic Portuguese dialect from the 1700′s called Cedilhero are spoken. Cedilhero is spoken here because Portuguese colonists were the first people to settle in the region at that time. Cedilhero is close to Alentejan Portuguese. The youngest speakers are in their 60′s.

In the Xalima Valley in the towns of San Martín de Trevejo, Eljas and Valverde del Fresno, Fala is still spoken by almost all inhabitants. This is an Galician dialect that has been influenced by the Castillian and Extremaduran languages. Apparently the Galician settlers moved to the region long ago and then got cut off from the rest of Galicia and the lect underwent independent development. It’s fully intelligible with Galician.

A Portuguese lect is spoken in Almedilha in Salamanca Province. Little is known about this lect.

In the town of Calabor in Zamora, a Galician dialect with heavy Castillian and especially Senabrese Leonese influences is spoken. Little is known about this lect.

Map of the various lects is here.

If you speak Portuguese or Spanish, you might want to listen to these speakers and see if you can understand them. It’s better to cover up the subtitles though because that will help you understand better. Covering up the subtitles, I understood very little of what these folks were saying. But I only speak Spanish fairly well, and I don’t speak Portuguese at all, though I can read it a bit since I have studied it.

This video shows us that to some extent, categories like “Spanish” and “Portuguese” are more political than linguistic categories, since with a lot of these lects, it is hard to tell where one language ends or the other begins. It is also hard to put some of these lects into linguistic categories like “Spanish” or “Portuguese.”

Check Out Isleno Spanish

It will take some time for me to describe the history of this language. The Wikipedia article here is a good start.

The Islenos apparently arrived in from the Canary Islands to Louisiana and eastern Texas in the 1700′s. Over time, they were augmented by other Spanish immigrants from many other parts of Spain speaking a variety of languages including Catalan, Andalusian and Galician. In addition, over time there was a lot of interaction with the French speakers of Louisiana, so many French words went into the language. Somehow some Portuguese also went in. A huge amount of English vocabulary and even grammar has gone into the language, especially with the last generation of speakers. The Islenos retained their archaic Canarian Spanish from the 18th Century, speaking it as a first language up until the 1940′s due to the isolation of its main speech community on St. Bernard Parish near New Orleans. However, roads were built to the parish and in 1915, schools arrived. Repeated hurricanes caused Islenos to flee to New Orleans. A number of them served in World War 2 and Vietnam. The present generation of Isleno first language speakers are all over 60 years old. A few Islenos under 50 speak the language, and more can understand it but not speak it.

Islenos originally started out ranching cattle, but then they moved into planting sugar cane and growing a variety of crops for the New Orleans market. In the last century, many Islenos made their living by fishing, shrimping, crabbing, etc.

A group of them moved to San Antonio, Texas, where they fought in the Alamo and took part in other battles in the Texan War of Independence. Isleno Spanish died in San Antonio around 1950, but Islenos still maintain the culture there in other ways.

They still play songs called decimas and they continue to fix traditional Canarian dishes.

There is another dialect spoken by Islenos in Valenzuela, Louisiana called Brulis. However, this is mostly an Acadian French dialect. Another group of Islenos in Galveztown speak a dialect that is basically Mexican Indian Nahuatl of all things.

It is said that this accent is quite similar to Puerto Rican and Cuban Spanish. Many Cubans and Puerto Ricans also came from the Canary Islands around the same time, and Cuban and Louisiana Canarians used to trade with each other a long time ago.

If any of my readers can understand Spanish, I would be curious if you can understand this interesting rustic Spanish lect. I can understand Spanish fairly well, but I had a hard time with a lot of this speech, though some of it did sound something like Cuban Spanish. If you speak Spanish, let us know if you can understand these guys.

The Linguistic Isolation of Brazilians

From the comments section, a comment from a Brazilian physician, of all people:

Brazilians do not understand anything in Spanish.

A lot of Brazilians think they can understand Spanish due to the affinity of the languages, but when we try to communicate, we discover it’s quite different.
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When I traveled to Europe saying that I was Brazilian, people tried to talk to me in Spanish, but I had always to ask to speak in English.

I was born, grew up and live in the Northeast of Brazil, and I’m pretty sure to say that Brazilians understand better English than Spanish, although in the extreme South it’s the opposite.
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Brazilian people are monolingual. I’d say that only 10% of Brazilians know a second language. We are such a big country, and our economy is local. We barely interact with Spanish Latin America, unfortunately.

We understand better English cause we consume a lot of American and British culture, but only a very few Brazilians care to learn a second language. Mostly because for a lot of professions it’s not necessary.

You see, even me, a physician who depends on the English language to keep updated in my field, have a hard time with English. I took half an hour to write this simple opinion which I bet is full of mistakes.

This rings true with what I have found. I have met some Brazilians, mostly women. They often thought they spoke Spanish pretty well, but when you started speaking it with them, they were pretty lost. One had better English than Spanish. Quite a few others had such good English, that I didn’t even bother speaking Spanish with them. Another one knew some Spanish and English. I spoke to her in Spanish and English and she responded to me in Portuguese, Spanish and English. Within a few hours, I was already speaking some Portuguese. With another one, we tried to speak something called Portunol, which is some Spanish-Portuguese mixed language spoken on the Argentine-Brazilian border. It didn’t work very well.

I would agree with this guy on one thing: Brazilians think they speak and understand Spanish better than they really do. And English-speaking Brazilians are not uncommon.

Brazil has about 190 million people. You really don’t need to learn any other language to do just fine in Brazil, and most don’t.

It is similar in Hispanophone Latin America. I meet South Americans all the time who range in age from 26-46, and many of them can barely speak a single word of English. I have to communicate with them exclusively in Spanish. When you think about it, they are on a continent with hundreds of millions of Spanish speakers. Why bother to learn another language? Why bother to learn English? What for?

I can also affirm that South Americans definitely do not bother to learn Portuguese. Portuguese know more Spanish than South Americans know Portuguese. The typical South American attitude towards Portuguese is, “Why should I learn that?”

How To Divide Languages from Dialects – Structure or Intelligibility?

There are many ways of dividing languages from dialects. The three general methods are:

1. Historical

2. Structural

3. Intelligibility

The traditional method has tended to utilize structural and sometimes historical, but intelligibility is also often used. For an example of historical, let us look at some lects in France and Spain.

The various “patois” of French, incorrectly called dialects of French, are more properly called the langues d’oil. It is often said that they are not dialtects of French for historical reasons. Each of the major langues d’oil, instead of breaking off from French Proper (really the Parisien langue d’oil) had a separate genesis.

This is what happened. France was originally Celtic speaking. Around 700-800, the Celtic languages began being replaced by vulgar Latin. People didn’t travel around in those days, so a separate form of vulgar Latin + Celtic evolved in each region of France: Gallo and Angevin in the northwest, Poitevin and Saintongeais in the west, Norman and Picard in the north, Champenois, Franche-Compte and Lorrain in the east, Berrichon, Tourangeau and Orleanais in the center. None of these split off from French (Parisien)!

Each one of them evolved independently straight up from vulgar Latin on top of  a Celtic base in their region from 700-1200 or so. The distance between the langues d’oil and French is almost as deep as between English and Frisian.

After French was made the official language of France in 1539, the langues d’oil came under French influence, but that was just borrowing, not genetics.

In addition, in Spain, there are various languages that are not historically related to Spanish. Aragonese is straight up from vulgar Latin on a Basque base, later influenced by Mozarabic. Catalan started evolving around 700 or so. Murcian evolved from vulgar Latin later influenced by Mozarabic, Catalan and Aragonese. Extremaduran, Leonese and Asturian also broke off very early. None of these are historically Spanish dialects because none of them broke away from Spanish!

Of course it follows that langues d’oil, Catalan and Aragonese, evolving independently of French and Spanish from 700-1200 to present, will have deep structural differences between themselves and French and Spanish.

So you can see that the historical way of splitting languages ties in well with the structural method. Where languages have a deep historical split and a millenia or so of independent development, it follows logically that some deep structural differences would have evolved in a thousand years or so. So these two methods are really wrapping around each other.

Now we get to intelligibility. Intelligibility actually ties in well to structural analyses. Linguists who say we divide on structure and not on intelligibility are being silly. Where you have deep structural differences between Lect A and Lect B, it logically follows that you have intelligibility problems. Profound structural differences between two lects makes it hard for one to understand the other. The differential structure really gets in the way of understanding. So once again, one method is wrapping around the other.

As we can see, historical, structural and intelligibility analyses of splitting languages all tend to be part of the same process, that is, they are all talking about the same thing. And they will tend to reach similar conclusions when it comes to splitting languages.