Article Published by Italian Professor Chiara De Santi

Cultura e Comunicazione         

Chiara De Santi, Visiting Assistant Professor at Fredonia, has published an article in the journal “Cultura e Comunicazione” [Culture and Communication] about the linguistic awareness of native speakers trapped between standard Italian and their local dialect, where she analyzes the case of Tuscany, Italy. Why does this case matter?

Tuscany, Italy

While standard Italian and Tuscan have never been identical, they always have been similar, sufficiently so that speakers sense no distinct boundary between the two. Nowadays speakers are in fact trapped between standard Italian and dialect, and often a Tuscan is unable to discern if he/she is speaking Italian or a register of his/her local dialect. Moreover, the dialect is changing over time in a process that can be viewed as either an “Italianization” of Tuscan or a “Tuscanization” of Italian. The character of this change is of interest in the study of language convergence and language death.

In her article, De Santi introduces the Tuscan dialect, before presenting the first phase of field research, which seeks to establish the linguistic awareness and self-awareness of speakers in a Tuscan town. With the interview of nine “old” speakers (O) and five “young” speakers (Y), the data offer important insights into the perception of speakers and reveal apparent-time evidence of real-time change. The outcomes demonstrate differences between the O and Y groups, mostly in their perception of phonological forms (while the O group shows almost no awareness of the phonological forms that characterize Tuscan, the Y group displays greater awareness) and registers (again, the Y group demonstrates greater ability than the O group to identify which kind of register needs to be used in certain situations, i.e. in formal or informal situations). However, in the case of the lexicon, both groups have difficulty deciding whether lexemes belong to Italian or to Tuscan, though both groups are aware that Tuscans today speak differently from the past, rendering the dialect “more Italian.”

The article has been brought to the attention of linguists Thomas Cravens (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Luciano Giannelli (University of Siena, Italy) and Neri Binazzi (University of Florence, Italy).

Chiara De Santi. “La coscienza linguistica dei parlanti nativi tra italiano e dialetto: il caso toscano [The Linguistic Awareness of Native Speakers between Italian and the Dialect: The Tuscan Case].” In Cultura e Comunicazione Vol. V/6 (2015): 10-15, 52.