Diary: Thea Lenarduzzi, (2) Language Families

Read Part One of this post here

When, in the last days of April 1945, Mussolini was captured by the brigate Garibaldi on the shore of Lake Como and made to stand against a wall while his executioner took aim, Walter Audisio, the man believed to have fired the shot, found that the dictator had nothing at all to say. “Not a single word: not the name of a son, nor of his mother or wife, not even a cry, nothing.” Language, too, had turned its back on him.

Until the mid 1970s, more than half the population of Italy spoke dialetto at home and with friends, Italian being reserved for the workplace and when travelling. Fifty or so years later, this had been turned on its head, with the majority speaking Italian at home and with friends, and only 14 percent expressing themselves most readily in their dialetto. Unsurprisingly, it was the older members of society that kept the dialetti alive: as late as 2015, 32 percent of those aged over seventy-five—that is, those born, like Nonno, before the Second World War—spoke exclusively or mostly in a dialetto. Still now, my uncle Orfeo speaks only Friulano and, if necessary, because of out-of-towners like me, the more Italianate Veneto. After the obligatory school years, Orfeo simply let Italiano standard drop. It didn’t fit him. As the poet Paul Celan said of the Romanian spoken around him as he was growing up, it was “no more than a light coat one can take off easily”; how could it compare with his mother’s tongue, German, which was a “domain,” “my fate,” full-body immersion.