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Italian dialects have lost much terrain but they are still actively spoken all over the country, albeit more informally.
I do speak my dialect almost daily for example.
Very few Italian dialects or languages are at risk, although they have lost terrain. Dialects are spoken way more often the Southern you go, hearing someone speaking Lombard is becoming a rarity in most areas of Lombardy but hearing someone speaking Neapolitan is common anywhere in Campania.
This is because of the migration waves from the South to the North which made the use of Italian as a lingua franca first necessary and then more common than the local dialects and the school system who used to discourage it (it affected Northern regions more because these were the ones where more kids finished their studies from the 50s to the 80s)
Here's an example of an Italian speaking Romagnolo, at least one form of it. My mother always said it was closer to Latin than Italian but I don't know. At the very end he speaks a few words in Italian saying all is well and goodbye.
If anyone is interested, here is a site from UNESCO showing languages and how endangered they are. Did you know Germany has 13 languages, France 26, Italy 31?
Italian dialects have lost much terrain but they are still actively spoken all over the country, albeit more informally.
I do speak my dialect almost daily for example.
How distinct are the Italian dialects from each other? Do they border on being seperate languages? Or, can any Italian speaker understand them once they spend a few days getting used to the accent and local vocabulary?
They are distinct Romance languages coming of course from mostly Latin with minor influences from others. If I being from Romangna region, traveled to Milan, Rome, Naples, Venice, (which I have done) I would not be able to understand hardly anything if anything at all that was being said by local people speaking their languages. They may as well almost be speaking Chinese, LOL. People that study languages list them as separate and distinct languages than Italian and not dialects of Italian. They did not originate from Italian and developed separately. When Italy unified in the mid 1800s, they needed a national language and chose the language from Florence/Tuscany since it was historically better known and spoken than the others with the writings of Dante being Italian. At that time, Italian was the language of the educated people. The other languages are also written, not just spoken languages with at least in the case of Romagnolo, there are many poems, stories, and manuscripts written dating back to at least the middle ages.
I've often said that Spanish is more understandable to me as an Italian than a local language from a different part of Italy than where my ancestors are from.
Romagnolo has a lot of words that sound like piemontese, it was funny!
I have the impression that the areas in Italy in which dialects are the least used are here in Piedmont and in Lombardy. I have the impression that it is because in those areas in the last 60-70 years arrived a lot of people from all the rest of Italy, and if everyone spoke in his own dialect it would have been impossible to understand something. In practice Italian become the normally spoken language also in informal situation, practically no one of the people that moved here tried to learn the local dialect.
In general this is much more evident in large cities. For example in Piedmont to find easily someone who speaks Piemontese you have to stay away from Turin. Among my friends from Turin a lot have parents and relatives from different regions, and so they ended up to don't speak (nor understand) any dialect. The dialect is instead still more used in the little towns and villages, in particular by middle aged-old people.
The situation is probably similar in Lombardy, with the complication that the local language changes a lot city by city (the "lombardo" used in Milan sounds completely different from the dialect from Bergamo, the one from Brescia or the one from the Como area for example.)
Here in North-western Italy also the case of Aosta Valley is really particular. They already speak both French and Italian as official languages, and they also speak a really difficult dialect (the Franco-Provençal, sometimes called patois) that is more like a dialect of French than one of Italian. This language is also spoken in the neighbor areas of France, of Switzerland and in some valleys of Piedmont. In the other valleys of Piedmont Occitan is spoken instead.
My place is a mess, because I live just next to the border line between Franco-Provençal, Occitan and Piemontese. Piemontese is spoken all over the region, but then in addition in a lot of villages is also spoken Franco-Provençal or Occitan in practice.
For example my grandparents can speak Italian, piemontese and the local patois (while I really can't understand it, it is too difficult. Too many close vowels and words that don't sound at all alike the italian, piemontese or neither french conterparts. for example how was I supposed to understand that "gneuf" means "carrot" and "nôhrë dzânn" = "our people" ?).
I don't know much about the other dialect of Italy. Some are quite easy to understand for me, while others are more difficult than Spanish of Portuguese. In the written form they can be quite similar (but the grammar rules and the lexicon can be quite different). Anyway the most difficult part for me is the phonology, sometimes the words are nearly the same but you don't recognize them because of the strange pronunciation.
If someone wants to try to listen Piemontese, this is a parody of a movie dubbed in our dialect.
Also, the Italian government discouraged Italians from speaking their local languages because the government didn't want Italy to be divided up linguistically and culturally into different areas although in many aspects it still is. Italy became one country with one national language. Local languages were stigmatized as being for the uneducated. Only Italian would ever be taught in schools or be seen on public signs. After WWII when television became popular, and everything on TV was in Italian, it was another nail in the coffin for local languages.
When I was growing up, adults would only speak to me in Italian. They reserved their "dialect" for when they were angry with me. I was not really allowed to speak it for fear I would be deemed uneducated and backward by others.
BTW, I did not grow up in Italy but spent part of my childhood there into my 20s.
The video was fun. Thanks for posting it. I actually could understand a few words but not much, LOL.
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for example how was I supposed to understand that "gneuf" means "carrot" and "nôhrë dzânn" = "our people" ?).
