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A language learned in the kitchen
The grandfather's account is the documented history of Italian dialect loss, told from inside it. For the generation schooled between the wars and just after, dialect carried a real social penalty: it marked you as rural and uneducated, teachers corrected it out, and parents who wanted their children to leave the village had a rational interest in raising them in Italian. The shift was therefore not imposed so much as chosen, generation by generation, for good reasons — which is why it happened so fast and why it is so hard to reverse. Survey data shows exclusive dialect use at home falling from a clear majority in the 1970s to a small minority now, with comprehension outlasting production by about a generation, exactly the position Sara describes. What makes the loss specific rather than sentimental is the point he makes about untranslatable words. These are not poetic curiosities but terms for things the standard language never needed: tools, weather, kinds of soil, degrees of ripeness, the precise relation of a cousin. When the thing goes out of daily use the word goes with it, and vice versa. Note that the dialects are not uniformly in retreat — Veneto and Neapolitan remain robust, and dialect has gained prestige in music and online — but Salentino, like most, now has more people who understand it than speak it. The grandfather's test is the right one: a language survives where it is spoken without being thought about, which for most of history has meant the kitchen.