[eahm]

French.. you people have no idea how Italy is.

I speak differently than my brothers because I grew up at my grandparents 3 MILES! away and if I go to my family restaurant 2 MILES the other direction there is a different accent again, and I mean different words too not just the sound. Where I used to go to school 10 miles away they don't understand if I speak my dialect because it's a different region.

The whole Italy is like that, a different dialect every 2-3 miles, every family, town, city, province, county and region has different accents and ways to make food and recipes. My town is 3200 years old, older than the Romans, they used to fight, then ally then fight again with them etc., this dialect thing is very old, cultures, traditions and families.

Of course we have the Italian language in common and the main dialects are separated by the main city of the region then by the region itself but yep, that's how it is.

[tacker2000]

This article is about accents on letters (diacritics), not accents as in dialects.

I found your post interesting neverthelesss.

[Luker88]

It is probably connected.

Having so many different dialects (and full minor languages!) saying the same word slightly differently, Italians were forced to find (and use) a way to put the correct accent in writing.

Other languages probably don't have the mind boggling number of dialects Italy has. GP was not exaggerating, it really changes every few kilometers.

Like the article says: "situations like these are surprisingly few in English"

[qsort]

Well, that's because they're really languages and not dialects! They all derive from Latin, there is no "old Italian" or anything, at some point we decided the Florentine "dialect", having the most literary prestige, would be standard Italian.

Italians only really started speaking Italian in their day-to-day life after the war. It was mostly a written/literary language before that.

[Luker88]

Yes, surprisingly few Italian dialects are actually Italian derivatives (maybe only a couple?)

But there are differences between a dialect and a language, we can't say all of those are languages even if most come from Latin.

Italian wikipedia says that officially in Italy there are about 13 recognized languages (not counting Italian, plus French and Slovenian in some parts), and about a dozen main dialects.

In wikipedia you will notice 3 big dialect groups that are just that, groups of many, many dialects that do not qualify as languages.

It's more a difference of how recognized by the community those are, and how unified by grammar, locality and uniqueness. Kind of a gray area for many.

[lou1306]

> Well, that's because they're really languages and not dialects!

Indeed they are not strictly dialects of Italian, which followed its own evolution alongside them. I think most of them could still be explained as dialects of Latin, who underwent major "niche differentiation" in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Rome and the rise of barbaric kingdoms.

> [Italian] was mostly a written/literary language before that.

This is a bit of an exaggeration. Clearly, even before the early modern era "Italians" could understand each other. Dante (from Florence) lived in Genoa and Ravenna, and had no need for an interpreter from what we can gather. Ditto the many "Renaissance men" who toured around Italy (Leonardo: Florence->Milan; Raphael and Michelangelo: Florence->Rome; Galileo:Pisa->Padua). This level of interconnection becomes really hard to explain without a high degree of mutual intelligibility.

[eesmith]

In 6th grade, so back in 1982, I read the French SF novel "Malevil".

I was astounded (speaking as a US kid here), to learn that French people born and raised in France didn't natively speak French, but instead learned their regional language.

Here is an example, from https://archive.org/details/malevilmerl00merl/page/150/mode/... :

> And besides, Thomas was already quite isolated enough as it was: by his youth, by his city origins, by his cast of thought, by his character, and by his ignorance of our patois. I had to ask La Menou and Peyssou not to overdo the use of their first language — since neither of them had learned much French till they went to school — because at mealtimes, if they began a conversation in patois, then everyone else, little by little, would begin to drop into patois too, and after a while Thomas was made to feel a stranger in our life.

Two minutes ago I learned that "patois" has a distinct meaning in France: "patois refers to any sociolect associated with uneducated rural classes, in contrast with the dominant prestige language (Standard French)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patois

I am very ill-informed on the history of the topic, including the national language policies of France and Italy. I do know that Sardinian is not a dialect of Italian, but my knowledge isn't much deeper than that. ;)

[ValentinPearce]

IIRC in the early 1900s, coercive methods were used to stop children speaking their native regional languages, a lot of it in school.

In my region of Brittany (France) the most famous example that was on posters detailing good manners would say : "Il est interdit de parler breton et de cracher par terre" meaning "It's forbidden to speak Breton and to spit on the ground", placing both on the same level.

[rkomorn]

> I was astounded (speaking as a US kid here), to learn that French people born and raised in France didn't natively speak French, but instead learned their regional language.

As a French person born before 1982, I find this sentence questionable.

If you mean "there were some people who learned a local dialect", then sure, you could dig some up.

If you mean "many regions had dialects that were learned before French", then I believe you misunderstood (or were misled).

Finding anyone who even spoke a regional dialect would've been a novelty, let alone one who grew up speaking it before French.

[yawboakye]

it remains true to this day. gascon[0] is still spoken in south of france, by both young and old. i know because i've heard it spoken. the idea that the french speak french, italians italian, is very modern. european nations weren't as properly integrated as modern history will have us believe. iirc the integration sped up post-ww2. cf seeing like a state[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gascon_dialect

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

[bookofjoe]

See also: Jamaican Patois aka speakyspoke

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaican_Patois

[mousethatroared]

And it's great.

My HS Italian teacher's university thesis was on the different dialects within Naples and their various (ancient) Greek origins.

[paul_h]

England has small accent shifts every 25 mins (the other audible accent / http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7843058.stm) - the situation you describe is two communication orders more complicated than that!

[jen729w]

Closer than that in some places. I'm from Sunderland, which is contiguous with Gateshead, and then Newcastle. I can clearly hear when someone is from Sunderland vs. Newcastle, although 'a foreigner' - say, someone from London - might not be able to pick it.

I dare say Liverpudlians and Mancunians and Glaswegians and so on would make the same claim.

[morganf]

It doesn't compare to that coolness you just shared, but I'm from Long Island (right outside New York City) and I and everyone from my childhood town can differentiate a Long Island accent from a New Jersey accent (very similar but subtly different; a suburb on the other side of NYC) from a Queens accent (a type of NY accent from a NY neighborhood, whose most famous exemplar is The Nanny) from a Brooklyn accent (another type of NY accent, the Mel Brooks sort and how my dad speaks), etc etc. So, while, the US is nothing like Italy where every 3 miles there's a different language-or-dialect, the US accent isn't nearly as uniform as one might think, for even within cities and their suburbs, like my hometown in the above example, there is a comparable dynamic, where going not-that-far (these neighborhoods and suburbs aren't far from each other) people speak in accents that are notably different to locals, although surely people not from NY group it all together as "the NY accent" without differentiating the level-of-nasal-ness and other such contributing factors to the accent.

[umanwizard]

Sadly those Brooklyn and Queens accents are becoming rare in large parts of Brooklyn and Queens. You really have to go out to areas with few transplants (Long Island, Staten Island, or rapidly shrinking white working class parts of Bk/Queens) to hear the typical NYC-area accents being used as the main variety of the majority of the community.

[Cthulhu_]

I grew up in the province of Friesland [0], which is part of the Frisia cultural region, an area that was not occupied by the Romans back when so it retained some of its identity and culture - although a lot of that was erased by Christian missionaries and subsequent invasions and government takeovers etc etc etc.

Anyway, super local accent changes are a thing there as well, go north a few kilometers from where I grew up and you go from the "woods" to the "clay", which has its own intonation and possibly words. Then there were town specific stereotypes - people from this town will knife you, that town is full of inbreds, etc. That's probably a lot of made-up intentional drama though, lol.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friesland

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisia

[internet_points]

Similarly in Norway and Sweden, new dialects every few miles, with both pronounciation and word changes. Places that could reach each other by boat tend to have more similar dialects (while if there's a mountain in the way you can have a bigger difference, though flight distance is shorter)

[jjav]

Interesting. I know that as a spanish speaker, there are some Italians whom I understand almost perfectly (like 90% and I can fill in the other 10% from context), but there are other Italians speakers where I can't understand anything at all.

[pmichaud]

When I was doing a bunch of learning about linguistics, situations like this were very interesting and confusing to me. I still don't have a good working intuition for how this is possible. I don't understand what maintains the sound differences in the face of the continuous exposure to substantially different accents. It's empirically possible, but it's never made sense to me. Why don't you and your brothers end up talking the same after a while?

[umanwizard]

I mean, people do end up talking the same after a while. Regional differences are disappearing and being leveled all over the world due to the influence of centralized education systems and media.

[patrick41638265]

Same in some parts of Germany. In the area where I grew up in you can tell in which village a person is from just by the way they talk, and the villages are just ~3 km apart!

From what I know this is because it was a relatively remote, dangerous and poor region (all by the standards of hundred years back) which changed ownership a lot (between clergy, bavaria, prussia) and people were mostly left to themselves

[IAmBroom]

'Ennery 'Iggins, is that you?

[EbNar]

Italian here... Are you from the south of Italy, by any chance? Because I'm from there and it's exactly how you describe it.

[eahm]

Yeah, from near Urbino but moved to USA ~20 years ago.

[BobaFloutist]

You think that's bad, visit your friends to the East in Slovenia. You'd think they're doing it on purpose! How do so few people in such a small area make so many variations in the "same" language?

[int_19h]

Generally speaking, countries that have a lot of different ethnic groups and/or introduced universal education relatively late tend to be those with more diverse dialects. Think about it: in a world without newspapers and TV, where most people live their entire lives in the same village they have been born in, and relatively few travelers, any linguistic innovation that appears in one place is going to take a very long time to travel elsewhere. Thus, local dialects tend to diverge. Universal school education slows this down by introducing a standard literary language (and, historically, often in a very forcible way). Mass media, TV especially, leads to further homogenization.

[megablast]

> mean different words too not just the sound. Where I used to go to school 10 miles away they don't understand if I speak my dialect because it's a different region.

Like what? You have to give us examples.

[eahm]

Oh geez, for example in Italian to say here you say "qui", where I grew up I say "mchi" but my brothers say "mqui" or "mque", where I used to go to school they say "meque" with the weirdest sound.

To say what are you doing in Italian is "cosa fai" but I say "co fei" and my brothers "sa fei" and where I used to go to school they say "che fe".

These are just simple simple things but almost everything changes here and there and I can't put the sound with the words here, they actually sound different, and change where the actual accents are.

[kome]

you clearly haven't read the article... they are talking about diacritics (accents) and not inflection of the spoken language.

i find absolutely worrisome that nobody is reading the articles anymore, and they just read the title.

it makes the quality of the discussion very very low.

[huhkerrf]

From the site guidelines:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that"

Personally, the parent comment added a lot more, even inadvertantly, than one complaining about whether someone has or has not read the article.