I can relate to this because I had always grown up speaking Sicilian, a dialect native to the southern island of Sicily. My Nonna and Nonno, who had just immigrated to America and spoke almost no English, would babysit me during the day while my parents worked so I grew up speaking a mixture of the two languages. To this day, my Nonna still understands very little English so we communicate mainly in Sicilian. I had never realized that I was specifically speaking “Sicilian” until I was able to read. I noticed that the language I grew up speaking was very different from the formal Italian written in my Nonno’s books. This is when I first realized that there was more than one type of “Italian” language.
At first, I assumed that the different dialects found in Italy were similar to the different dialects in the United States. Here, regions like the South have their own slang and use different words (like “soda” instead of “pop”), but the language is generally the same throughout the country and English speakers can transition between the two dialects with ease.
This is not the case in Italy. My Zia Fran, who speaks both formal Italian and Sicilian, describes the Sicilian language as being a more informal version of Italian with its own phrases and slang terms. She has no trouble switching between the two dialects, yet my mother, who has had no formal training in the formal Italian (she moved to America when she was only 6 years old), cannot read or write in formal Italian at all. It is very interesting to me that the different dialects found throughout the Italian peninsula and surrounding islands are so different from one another that even natives of the country cannot understand other region’s dialects without some kind of training.
It was very interesting to hear Cornish’s point of view on the dialect differences during her translation theme semester lecture. She explained the origin of these differences, which was very enlightening since I never understood exactly why the dialects were so dissimilar. It was also interesting when she showed an RAI commercial in different Italian dialects that was shown to the different regions in Italy. I had never realized that even Italian television operates according to the different dialects.
I have begun studying formal Italian recently and have definitely noticed the difference in the two. My background in Sicilian has given me a very basic understanding of Italian, but it is still amazing to me how different the two languages are from one another. It truly is like learning two separate languages.
