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?
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| 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.
