#minoritised languages

10th century - Placiti Campani

The first written evidence of Neapolitan dates back to the 10th century, when four sworn declarations were composed in modern-day Campania. Despite the brevity and formulaic nature of the texts, the Placiti campani provide an invaluable early example of the vernacular spoken in Campania, and allegedly the first one in the Italian peninsula.

15th century - Aragonese Court

Neapolitan becomes the main language of public administration and internal affairs of the Aragonese kingdom.

In the 15th century, the newly established Aragonese monarchy in Naples and Southern Italy pioneered the use of Neapolitan as the language of public administration and internal affairs until the end of its rule.

In the 15th century, the newly established Aragonese monarchy in Naples and Southern Italy pioneered the use of Neapolitan as the language of public administration and internal affairs until the end of its rule.

During this time, in addition to being one of the official court languages, Neapolitan slowly replaced Latin, and was used for poems, chronicles, and treatises. The oldest full history of Naples written in this language, however, is the Chronicle of Parthenope, which dates back to 1350, prior the establishment of Aragonese monarchy.

17th century - I

With the spread of Tuscan among elites post-1500, 17th-century intellectuals in Naples were making a case for the dignity of Neapolitan as a literary language.

While Neapolitan had been adopted by earlier authors, monarchs and religious authorities, only in the second half of the 17th century did it establish itself, although not without dissent, as a rich literary language.

Specifically, it is with the works of Giambattista Basile and Giulio Cesare Cortese that Neapolitan transformed into a fully fledged, alternative literary language (as opposed to Tuscan) used for both conventional genres and original ones, including the pastoral, novel, lyric, epic, satire, mock-epic, fairy tale, and opera.

17th century - II

Intellectuals aimed to create an illustrious vernacular that could rival Tuscan and to legitimise it as an equally worthy language. 

According to Neapolitan intellectuals, Tuscan could not be given the label of a more literary language. The use of their native Neapolitan, instead of the foreign Tuscan, served to shape and legitimise an autonomous, and equally respectable, literary reality.

18th century

In the 18th century, to take a stand against the taste for Italian Mannerism in Tuscan, there was an outburst of literary production in Neapolitan.

As the literary production of the early 18th century carried forward the legacy of Cortese and Basile, literary academies in Naples hosted public readings of works in Neapolitan which were written by and for the members of the Neapolitan elites.

The 18th century was also the time in which the first grammars of Neapolitan appeared. The first to be written was Francesco Oliva’s Grammatica della lingua napolitana (1723), while the first to be published was Ferdinando Galiani’s Del dialetto napolitano (1779). Yet, despite the literary success of Neapolitan, many stigmatised it as ignoble, and the exclusive language of the plebs.

Ferdinando Galiani

For Galiani, Neapolitan was not just the language of the populace, but the cultural property of the nation.

“Therefore we do not despair yet (...) Perhaps one day our dialect will achieve the most unexpected fortune: we will defend our causes in this language, pronounce our decrees, promulgate our laws, write our annals, and do everything that the patriotic zeal of the Venetians has allowed them to do in their own harmonious dialect”.

19th century - Music

Neapolitan and Neapolitan-language music have a rich and long-standing tradition.

The earliest mention of the performance of villanellas coincides with the visit of king Charles V (or Charles II of Spain) to Naples between 1535 and 1536. The first anonymous collection of villanellas was published shortly after.

After the king’s visit, villanellas, which were sung in Neapolitan, acquired clear political undertones and became representative of Neapolitans’ national identity in the 16th century.

However, the song fest of Piererotta marks a turning point in Neapolitan music history. Starting officially in 1835, the festival constituted a major festivity attracting tourists from both within and outside the kingdom.

1861 and Fascism

At the moment of the unification of Italy in 1861, less than 2,5% of the population was able to use Italian.  

Much like Latin in the previous centuries, Italian was an exclusively written and literary language known only to a minority of literate people.

The appearance of the first bilingual dictionaries immediately before and after the unification confirms that Neapolitan was not only the language of the common people but also that of the literate.

In the aftermath of the unification, these dictionaries were used to help students who were monolingual in Neapolitan to learn Italian, the language of the new state.

In the 20th century, the nationalist agenda of the fascist regime suppressed the use of all minority languages and enforced the use of Italian in its stead, especially at school. Children were beaten or otherwise punished, generating fear and shame towards their native languages.