“Sono un italiano, un italiano vero!”

Who doesn´t love this beautiful, elegant language?

Everywhere I go and whenever I say that I am Italian, I always receive from others an outstanding feedback of admiration both for my beautiful country and for my beautiful language. L´italiano is a complex, elegant language, full of rules and exceptions: not just because of its grammar, but mostly for the millions expressions and terms, the tone and the several dialects it has. Concerning the dialects it is very important to know that they were born from Latin and one of them , the Tuscan dialect, denominated the Vulgar language, gave birth to our national language: Italiano.

Everybody associates the Italian as the language of Dante Alighieri, who was the first to use the Tuscan dialect in his works. Other poets such as Petrarca, Boccaccio used it too and all of them were considered vulgar when today thanks to them we speak this amazing language, it is funny, isn´t it? I am talking about the XIII century, long time ago eh?

But if today a foreigner travels to Italy, he/she discovers that not everybody speaks English, the international language today, and that everybody speaks different ways of Italian: dialects, with different sounds, accents, expressions.

Not just every region has different dialect, but every little village has its different sounds: INCREDIBLE!

But with the term Dialect we refer to a variation of the principal language, even if today every dialect is considered a proper local language. In Italy we have a lot of dialects, such as: the Lombardo, Veneto, Napoletano, Piemontese, Siciliano, Calabrese, etc.

I am from Calabria (South of Italy) and my dialect has a hard sound, it is sort of a rude dialect, but every time I travel there and I listen to my grandparents or farmers or my closest friends speaking it, I feel proud of my origins. You should know that a dialect was and unfortunately is still considered a low language, spoken by who did not study or has not a high cultural level; but today I think that speaking a dialect is something admirable, something that belongs to us, because it is our origin.

I will write below a few differences between italian and my dialect, just to show the beauty of it:

Italian                Calabrese

Cocomero          Zuppangulu

Caldo                  Caddu

Ciliegie               Cirasi

Pulire                 Pulizzara/Pulizzari (North/South of Calabria)

Agnello              Agnedu/Agneju (Center/West-South of Calabria)

My country has the shape of a boot… but in this “little boot” there are sooo many things to teach and show to its tourists!

As the song says: “Sono un italiano, un italiano vero!“