Dialect

1) 2) and 3) Dialect culture retains its full force as long as it is defined as a municipal culture, something strictly local, guaranteeing the identity of a town, a country area, a valley, and differentiating these with respect to other neighbouring towns, country areas, valleys. When a dialect starts to become regional, in other words a kind of inter-dialect, it has already entered the purely defensive phase, in other words its decadence. Regional dialects like ‘Piedmontese’, ‘Lombard’, and ‘Veneto’ are relatively recent and bastardized creations, and today they need to be seen in the context of the major mass emigrations, seen as related to the dramatic situation which both for the immigrants and for the indigenous peoples is represented by this enforced clash of cultures, which are no longer the previous local cultures nor are they yet a new culture which transcends them.

The situation of dialects was different in the Italy which lasted up until a quarter of a century ago, where municipal identity had very strong characteristics and was self-sufficient. In the days when I was a student, in other words already in a society which spoke the standard language fluently, dialect was still what marked us out, what distinguished those of us from San Remo from our contemporaries from Ventimiglia or Porto Maurizio, and gave rise to frequent jibes among us; not to mention the even stronger contrast between the dialects of mountain villages, like Baiardo and Triora, which reflected a completely different sociological situation, and so these dialects lent themselves easily to being caricatured by those of us living in the coastal towns. In this world (which to tell the truth was very narrow) dialect was a way of defining ourselves as speaking subjects, of giving a shape to the genius loci, in short of existing. It is not at all my intention to mythicize nostalgically that very narrow cultural horizon, merely to state that in those days there existed an expressive vitality, in other words the sense of particularity and precision, which disappears when dialect becomes generic and lazy, as it does in the ‘Pasolinian’ age of dialect: Pasolini sees dialect solely as a residue of popular vitality.

Lexical richness (as well as richness in expressiveness) is (or rather, was) one of the great strengths of dialects. Dialects have the edge on the standard language when they contain words for which the standard language has no equivalent. But this lasts only as long as certain (agricultural, artisan, culinary, domestic) techniques last – techniques whose terminology was created or deposited in the dialect rather than in the standard language. Nowadays, in lexical terms, dialects are like tributary states towards the standard language: all they do is give dialectal endings to words that start off in technical language. And even outside the terminology of trades, the rarer words become obsolete and are lost.

I remember that the old folk of San Remo knew dialects that represented a lexical wealth that was irreplaceable. For instance: chintagna, which means both the empty space that remains behind a house that has been built (as always in Liguria) up against terraced land, and also the empty space between the bed and the wall. I do not think an equivalent word exists in Italian; but nowadays the word does not exist even in dialect; who has heard of it or uses it now? Lexical impoverishment or homogenization is the first sign of a language’s death.

4) My dialect is that of San Remo (now called sanremese but formerly known as sanremasco) which is one of the many Ligurian dialects of the Western Riviera, in other words of an area very distinct, in terms of cadence and phonetics, from the Genoa area (which stretches up to and including Savona). I lived the first twenty-five years of my life there almost without interruption, in times when the indigenous population were still in the majority. I lived in an agricultural environment where it was mostly dialect that was used, and my father (about half a century older than me, having been born in 1875 into an old San Remo family) spoke a dialect that was much richer and more precise and expressive than that spoken by my contemporaries. Consequently I grew up steeped in dialect but without ever having learnt it, because the strongest influence on my upbringing was my mother, who was an enemy of dialect and a rigid upholder of the purity of the Italian language. (I have to say that I have never learnt to speak fluently in any language, not least because I have always been a man of few words: and quickly my expressive and communicative needs became focused on the written language.)

When I began to write seriously, I was obsessed with the idea that my Italian should be calqued on dialect, because as I sensed the fake quality of the language used by the majority of writers, the only guarantee of authenticity which I thought I could achieve was this closeness to the spoken usage of the people. This approach can be detected in my earliest books, whereas it becomes rare subsequently. A sensitive reader from San Remo and old connoisseur of its dialect (a lawyer whom Soldati turned into a character in one of his books) recognized and appreciated dialectal uses in my books even later on: now he is dead and I do not believe there is anyone any more who is capable of doing this.

The impact of dialect soon becomes adulterated in whoever moves away from the place and daily conversation there. After the war I moved to Turin, where at that time dialect was still very strong at all levels of society, and although I tried to resist changing my natural Ligurian dialect, the different linguistic atmosphere could not but rub off on the way I spoke, given these dialects’ common Gallo–Italic roots.

Nowadays my wife speaks to me in the Spanish of the River Plate, and my daughter in the French used by the school-kids of Paris: the language in which I write no longer has anything to do with any language spoken around me, except through my memory.

[Reply to a survey by Walter della Monica. Some of the points were published in La Fiera Letteraria, 9 May 1976. The questions were: 1) What weight can the knowledge and use of dialects have in contemporary culture? Could a renewal of interest in dialects typify a new culture? 2) Do dialects still have something to contribute to the Italian language? 3) Do you know a dialect? Has it impinged on the linguistic quality of your work? (Author’s note.)]