I remember the lombardo boys who hung around in the park behind the shopping mall, talking in their low yodelling vowels and clipped nasalities. To them, who heard us talking among ourselves in English, we were foreign, inglesi. Now my young cousins are taught the local Friulano in school.
Thank you for this lovely essay, I'm very interested in reading your book now.
I too, have grown up with several languages and rootlessness is a familiar feeling, though not necessarily a problem. No dialect in my blood however, as even my Milanese great-grandparents couldn't speak it. But since many Italian dialects are written as well as spoken, and have produced great names in both prose and poetry, I've been able to enjoy quite a lot of their outstanding contributions to literature.
Such a wonderful subject—how we experience writing in these different modalities of our own language. I wonder if there is an English as distinct from standard English as Friulano is from Milanese. We have strong accents but the written language bends to capture them.
Thank you for this lovely essay, I'm very interested in reading your book now.
I too, have grown up with several languages and rootlessness is a familiar feeling, though not necessarily a problem. No dialect in my blood however, as even my Milanese great-grandparents couldn't speak it. But since many Italian dialects are written as well as spoken, and have produced great names in both prose and poetry, I've been able to enjoy quite a lot of their outstanding contributions to literature.
Such a wonderful subject—how we experience writing in these different modalities of our own language. I wonder if there is an English as distinct from standard English as Friulano is from Milanese. We have strong accents but the written language bends to capture them.
Beautiful!