entry 2005
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.
The Other Italy: the Literary Canon in Dialect, by Herman W. Haller (1999) University of Toronto Press.*
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. This depended on
who was running the kingdom at the time in what was sort
of a revolving game of dynastic musical chairs, 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
people speaking the way they speak. 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). It is
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.
Comment added in May, 2022
On language vs. dialect. "Dialects" often run the risk of being stigmatized, that is, disapproved of by the official state-approved language of the majority. Also, certain dialects are "self-stigmatized", that is, speakers start disapproving of the way they, themselves. speak. (It happens all the time: "Oh, I just speak a dialect." In Italy, Neapolitan is one such self-stigmatized dialect; Sicilian is another. In February of 2022, a Sicilian newspaper ran an article that reported on the responses by 9-10 year-old school kids on the difference between Italian and Sicilian. Their comments are interesting: "The mafia, thieves, and bad kids speak Sicilian. The police, teachers, and good kids speak Italian." "Women speak Italian. Men speak dialect."
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