 main index © Jeff Matthews 2002-2012 Dialect Literature
in Neapolitan
…the dialect tends to be inflected with realism, as the language of anger and curse, of social protest and transgression, and also as the language of play and satire, of buffoonery and plebeian mockery, celebrating life in a feast of tongues.  If you study
Italian as a foreign language, you learn the
national language of the modern nation state of
Italy. As a bit of history, you may also learn
that modern Italian developed, first, from Dante’s
brilliant justification in De Vulgari
Eloquentia (1305) of
writing in the vernacular language—in his case,
Tuscan—instead of Latin and, second, from his Divine Comedy,
a work that showed that the vernacular could,
indeed, produce great literature. Yet, if you
examine the premise of De Vulgari Eloquentia, it makes
perfect sense that the same freedom to write
vernacular literature extended to those whose
native language was some variety of medieval Latin
vernacular other than Tuscan. Thus, the Italian
peninsula developed, on the one hand, a drive
towards a standard language and, on the other, a
strong tradition towards maintaining regional
dialects. Even today, only about one-third of the
population of Italy uses the standard language all
the time, that is, in all circumstances, domestic
and official. Most Italians, at least some of the
time, use a regional dialect. In that respect,
then, most Italians are “bilingual”—or
“bidialectal.” (Note that Italian dialects may
differ from one another considerably, so much so
that they are mutually incomprehensible; thus, we
are not talking simply about different “accents”
of the same language, but rather different
languages.) Naples is one of those areas in Italy that has had a considerable history over the past 700 years of independent development as a vehicle for literature, poetry, song and theater. There is a definable body of literature as far back as Croniche de la inclita Cità de Napole (attributed to Giovanni Villani) from around 1300—that is, the time of Dante. It is here that we learn of the origins of Virgil's reputed powers of legerdemain. (It does not go without saying that Neapolitan was also the language of the court and of official documents— depending on who was running the kingdom at the time—on and off for centuries, from as early as the late 1200s when Matteo Spinello of Giovenazzo maintained court journals for Manfred of Sicily all the way down to documents of the Bourbon dynasty, the last to rule the kingdom of Naples.)  Along
with other dialects in Italy, Neapolitan has at
times enjoyed great success; for example (in the
case of Naples) the 1700s and the great period of
dialect musical theater. At other times —for
example, during the authoritarian period of Fascism
and its drive towards standardization in all things—
the dialect had less success. Today, dialects are
again going strong in Italy, riding the wave of
cultural diversity in Europe, in general. If you
look at the dialect films of Italian
neo-Realism from around 1950 such as Sciuscià
or La terra trema
(in Neapolitan and Sicilian, respectively) dialects
seem to emphasize, almost to the point of despair,
the differences among Italians in post-war Italy.
Yet, more recent films, such as Il Postino
(1994), which features the Neapolitan comic actor Massimo Troisi (speaking
dialect throughout) seem to have a thread of
national unity running through them, as if to say
that perhaps dialect differences don’t really matter
that much. In other words, the use of a dialect is
not a political statement of protest or rebellion;
it’s simply a guy speaking the way he speaks. The
same can be said for Troisi/Neapolitan and Roberto
Benigni/Tuscan carrying on conversations with each
other in essentially two different languages in the
film Non ci resta
che piangere (1985).  In Naples, the most
obvious recent examples of dialect success are the
theatrical works of Eduardo
de Filippo, many of which are realist plays
employing diglossia (shifting back and forth from
dialect to standard language)—realist because that
is just the way real language happens on the
streets of Naples. Other 19th and early
20th-century examples of dialect success in
Neapolitan are Antonio
Petito (1824-76) (the actor/playwright
who updated and made famous internationally the
iconic Neapolitan character of Pulcinella), Eduardo Scarpetta, Salvatore Di Giacomo,
Raffaele Viviani, Libero Bovio, Ferdinando Russo, and
dozens of lyricists in the vast repertoire of the
“Neapolitan Song,” a
genre so successful abroad as a symbol of Italy,
that virtually all
non-Italians think that ‘O sole mio is Italian when it
is really Neapolitan. It is also the case that
many dialect actors and playwrights from the early
1900s passed the tradition on to their children,
such that today there are still revered "family
theaters" carried on by the likes of, for example,
Luigi de Filippo, son of Peppino
de Filippo. Also, contemporary musicologist,
Roberto de Simone,
has been significant in reviving dialect
literature and comic opera from the 1700s. Dialects
have been used over the centuries to make social
statements, as when the 16th-century Neapolitan poet
and musician, Velardiniello,
wrote Farza de li
massare, in which peasant characters
denounced in dialect their social condition under
Spanish rule. Or, it has simply produced
non-political literature (see this related entry) in
the hands of authors such as Giovanni
Basile) and Giulio
Cesare Cortese (1570-1640), one of Basile’s
contemporaries and one of the great dialect writers
in the age of the Neapolitan Baroque. A lesser-known
example is Pompeo
Sarnelli, whose Polisecheata (1684) about
Posillipo is a “frame story” such as those by
Chaucer, Boccaccio and Sarnelli’s contemporary,
Basile.As noted, the 1700s produced dialect musical theater (that later turned into the Italian-language “Comic Opera” of Naples. One of the great librettists of the day was Francesco Antonio Tullio (1660-1737). He collaborated with musicians such as A. Scarlatti and worked easily in both dialect and standard language. (He was, in fact, the librettist in 1718 for the first non-dialect opera buffa, Scarlatti’s Il trionfo dell’onore, billed at the time as being in “Tuscan” (!) and not dialect.) Tullio’s younger contemporary, Pietro Trinchera (1702-55) often used dialect for social purposes; in his La moneca fauza—the villains speak Tuscan and the good guys speak Neapolitan. He wrote against clerical abuse and wound up in jail for his protests on a number of occasions.  The 1600s produced
all over Italy a great number of erudite treatises
on why “our” dialect is better than the Tuscan of
Dante. The Neapolitan version was L’eccellenza della
lingua napoletana con la maggioranza alla
Toscana by Partenio Tosco, written 1662. The
1700s also produced any number of handbooks and
guides to Neapolitan grammar and style. Also,
since the 1600s, a number of classics have been
translated into Neapolitan, including The Illiad, The Aeneid,
Tasso’s Jerusalem
Liberated, Vergil’s Bucolics and
Georgics,
and even The
Divine Comedy. Modern foreign language
classics (such as Alice in Wonderland, seen in the
above illustration) have also been translated.
Finally, the Bible in Neapolitan now exists,
thanks to the translating efforts of don Matteo
Coppola, a priest from the Sorrento diocese. It
took him 10 years, but he has finished the entire
Bible. He also holds forth on the Scriptures twice
a week on Metropolis Tv, Sky channel 902—in dialect,
naturally.[Also see this brief item on Michele Sovente.] ------------------------- *note: I am indebted to The Other Italy: the Literary Canon in Dialect, the book cited at the top of this page; it is a work of monumental thoroughness and scholarship. An unsigned article, "Provincialisms of the European languages," in The Edinburgh Review (April, 1844) was also useful. Also see The Neapolitan Language. to: Subject portal for literature |