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Is it true that people speaking in different Italian dialects don't always understand each other?
i know that it's a really old question, but in my opinion it's also quite interesting.
In practice here in Italy when we say "dialetto" (=dialect) we are not referring to a regional variation of standard italian, but to a minor language that developed on his own from latin. so a lot of our dialect uses different words and grammar rules, and can also sound really different one from each other.
example:
Italian: il brav'uomo si riconosce quando non c'è più
piemontèis: 'L brav' om a s' cunòss quand a-i-è pi nen
(this the dialect from my region.)
that's just a little example, but you can already see that there is a quite big difference.
in general it's quite easy to understand the dialects spoken in the near regions, but really difficult to understand the dialect of the furthest. the dialects from central italy are the ones more similar to standard italian, in particular the Tuscany's dialect was the base for modern Italian and it's still practically the same as italian.
This makes often really difficult to understand someone that it's speaking a dialect different from yours. for example i understand south italy dialects as much as spanish (and also with spanish i've a lot of problems).
i know that it's a really old question, but in my opinion it's also quite interesting.
In practice here in Italy when we say "dialetto" (=dialect) we are not referring to a regional variation of standard italian, but to a minor language that developed on his own from latin. so a lot of our dialect uses different words and grammar rules, and can also sound really different one from each other.
example:
Italian: il brav'uomo si riconosce quando non c'è più
piemontèis: 'L brav' om a s' cunòss quand a-i-è pi nen
(this the dialect from my region.)
that's just a little example, but you can already see that there is a quite big difference.
in general it's quite easy to understand the dialects spoken in the near regions, but really difficult to understand the dialect of the furthest. the dialects from central italy are the ones more similar to standard italian, in particular the Tuscany's dialect was the base for modern Italian and it's still practically the same as italian.
This makes often really difficult to understand someone that it's speaking a dialect different from yours. for example i understand south italy dialects as much as spanish (and also with spanish i've a lot of problems).
As a french native speaker, I have to say that spanish and italian used to sound very alike and that portuguese (at least the one they speak in brasil) sounds a bit more familiar although I don't understand it.
Someone said that french borrows from german, I think it's true mostly in a phonetic way.
German was the first foreign language I took at school, and while it's generally considered a difficult and harsh sounding language among french speakers, I never had any difficulty to pronounce it since many sounds are similar to french, mainly all the "semi vowels" or whatever it's called. I mean all those sounds like "en", "in", "on" which exist in german (albeit in a slightly different form) do not exist in other latin/roman languages (to my knowledge). Same for the "u" which is the equivalent of the german "u" with umlauts.
On the contrary, I took some spanish lessons and I had a hard time to pronounce some sounds which i guess are derived from arabic, mainly all the types of r sounds they have.
Italian was easier since it's very similar to french in many ways (grammar, verbs, etc), the only difficulty I have is again the "r" but that's because the french "r" is essentially the same as the german one.
Actually I find english more difficult to pronounce than german even if I can barely have a conversation in german nowadays. The english "th" sound has always been very difficult.
Also, the main difficulty for french native speakers is finding on which part of the word you have to put the accent, because french is a very flat language and every word has the accent at the same place.
Last edited by forgotten username; 09-09-2014 at 06:43 AM..
France as you may know used to been known to the Romans as Gaul and latin was spoken there. The Franks (hence France) were a Germanic tribe which took over France and in doing so they greatly changed the way French is pronounced. However have a look:
French: parler, mettre, sentir, prendre, poser, traduire, attendre,
Italian: parlare, mettere,sentire,prendere,posare,tradurre, attendere,
Spanish: hablar, poner, sentir, tomar, plantear, traducir, esperar,
Not at all, Frank influence in French is next to nothing.
Visigothic influence in Spanish is next to nothing, about five words.
Longobards, Ostrogoths, etc, influence in Italian is next to nothing.
The influence is important in the way the words are pronounced, especially in northern/standard french. Aside from that, you can say it's quite limited.
People greatly overstate the Frankish influence on French. Modern French pronunciation developed quite recently linguistically speaking, and the spread of French as a daily language is even more recent, even within France.
French underwent many shifts in pronunciation during the 19th century, particularly the loss of the rolled R that featured in other Romance languages, as well as the "wa" sound from the digraph "oi". Old and Middle French (pre-12th century) were remarkably similar to modern-day Catalan. If you look at the Oath of Strasbourg, which is from the 9th Century, it's still remarkably close to Latin despite Gaul having been conquered by the Franks 400 years prior.
Also, prior to World War II, most French people still spoke regional languages as their mother tongue rather than French, and many of these languages, even some of the Langues d'Oil, sound nothing like French.
French and Portuguese (from Portugal) sound somewhat similar, but speakers don't have an easy time understanding each other. Romanian and standard Italian are both often pronounced more crisply than the other languages (although Romanian sounds more monotone in comparison). I'd guess that Romanians could probably understand Italian more easily than Italians could understand Romanian -- all the suffixes must create confusion (they confused me).
A couple days a week I work at what I'll describe as laid-back interpretation (mostly French), but with lots of people of different languages and other multi-lingual people. Anyway, my experience is that Spanish, Italian and Portuguese speakers really don't understand French speakers and vice-versa, although if speaking slow enough, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese speakers can communicate at some level. When learning a second language, a native of one of those three languages can pretty easily pick up one of the other two in my opinion, but need to make more of an effort with French.
Quebecois and French from France sound very different to me, but I didn't have a hard time understanding French from Canada when I was first introduced to it. But I have a terrible time understanding Portuguese Portuguese even though I understand Brazilian Portuguese pretty well. I wonder if native speakers find there to be a lot of differences in the dialects.
I don't know anything about Catalan unfortunately.
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