Quello che abbiamo imparato — What We Have Learned

Now go and meet the other Italies

This course has taught you standard Italian, which is essentially literary Tuscan promoted to a national language, and it will serve you everywhere. What it will not always do is match what you hear. When Italy unified in 1861 only a small fraction of the population spoke it — estimates range from two to ten percent — and everyone else spoke a local language that had descended from Latin in parallel, not from Italian. That matters: Neapolitan, Sicilian, Venetian, Piedmontese, Sardinian and the rest are not accents and not corrupted Italian, they are sibling languages, and several are recognized as such by UNESCO. Radio, television and universal schooling did in eighty years what centuries had not, and today almost everyone speaks standard Italian; but a great many people are bilingual in it and something local, switching between them by situation without particularly noticing. What you will actually meet most of the time is the middle layer, italiano regionale — standard grammar carrying local vocabulary, local intonation and a few local turns of phrase. A Roman and a Milanese are both speaking Italian and neither sounds like a textbook. Ask someone to repeat, or to say it in italiano, and nobody will mind in the slightest. Three things are worth doing next, and they are more useful than another course. Watch Italian films with Italian subtitles rather than English ones, so that your ears and your eyes are learning the same language. Read a newspaper a few times a week — Il Post is written in unusually clear prose — and let the unknown words go past rather than looking up every one. And speak badly, often, to real people. Every character in this course has spent fifty-two lessons being patient with a learner, which is not a fiction: Italians are, as a rule, delighted that you are trying, and they will correct you cheerfully and then keep talking. In bocca al lupo.