#tuscan dialect

Dante Alighieri

Artist: Henry James Holiday (English, 1839-1927)

Date: n. d.

Medium: Pencil, watercolour and bodycolour heightened with gum arabic on paper

Collection: Private Collection

Portrait of Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri (c. May 1265 – September 14, 1321), widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa (modern Italian: Commedia) and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.

As requested by @moonstruckgay, here goes a quick overview of the Italian spoken in Tuscany toscani perdonatemi se scrivo scemenze, non sono del posto

Is Tuscan dialect really a thing?

Yes and no. The dialect spoken in Florence in the 14th century was actually the foundation for the creation of standard Italian, which is why Tuscan isn’t traditionally perceived as a “regular” dialect: the regional varieties spoken in Tuscany are therefore often called “vernacoli”, to differentiate them from other Italian dialects. In recent years, however, the term dialect is increasingly being applied to these varieties as well in scientific literature.

Is there only one Tuscan dialect?

There are quite a lot of them, actually! In 1977 Giovan Battista Pellegrini outlined seven (fiorentino, senese, toscano occidentale, aretino, grossetano-amiatino and apuano), but the truth is you might find even more, set apart by small and large differences. Still, there are a few traits that stay more or less consistent throughout the whole area: let’s have a look at them.

Phonetics

The most famous phenomenon is probably what is known as Tuscan gorgia: the voiceless stops /k/, /t/ and /p/ are pronounced as fricative consonants ([h], [θ] and [ɸ]) in post-vocalic position (when not blocked by syntactic gemination, but we’ll get to that one later). This is why in Italy we feel compelled to ask every Florentine specimen we ever come across to pronounce the infamous sentence: “vorrei una Coca-Cola con la cannuccia corta corta”, and then rejoice in seeing them aspirate every single “c” while they surely wish us a slow and painful death

This so-called gorgia also affects other consonants, like /g/, /d/ or /b/, and the affricates /ʤ/ and /ʧ/, which respectively become [ʒ] and [ʃ].

This phenomenon is at ist strongest in Florence and Siena, but can be observed in other areas as well. In the Arno valley, the fricativisation of /k/ is pretty consistent.

The affrication of /s/ is also common, albeit a little less: when preceded by /r/, /l/ or /n/, the voiceless s might turn into a voiceless alveolar affricate ([ts]).

This is common in the whole region (as well as central Italy in general), except for the area of Florence and Prato.

We mentioned syntactic gemination before, so let’s get a little more into detail about that: it’s a pretty common phenomenon in Italian, where, under certain circumstances, the first letter of a word is doubled in pronunciation. It usually happens after words stressed on the last syllable (ex. perché mai? will sound like perché mmai?), after a stressed monosyllable (ex. è giusto? --> è ggiusto?), with a couple of unstressed monosyllables such as the preposition “a”. In Tuscany, however, other words such as “dove”, “come” or “da” might trigger the phenomenon, so you’re likely to hear things like “dove vvai?”, “come vva?” or “da ccasa”.

Morphology

As it happens in a number of regional varieties of Italian, the object pronoun “te” is sometimes used as a subject instead of “tu”.

Ex. Tu ci hai capito qualcosa? --> Te ci hai capito qualcosa? (”Did you catch any of that?”)

The use of noi + impersonal si is also viewed as very characteristic. If you know French, it might be easier to assimilate this to the use of “on”: we’re talking about a group of people, and the subject should formally be “noi”, only it’s replaced by “si”, and the verb is subsequently conjugated to the third person singular. This might look more immediate with an example.

Let’s imagine you want to say that you had lunch at a resaurant. In standard Italian, that would be “(noi) abbiamo mangiato al ristorante”; in Tuscany, you might hear “(noi) s’è mangiato al ristorante” instead.

Possessive pronouns like mio, tuo or suo might also sound a little different. When they’re placed before a noun, they may in fact lose their endings (mi’, tu’, su’)! This, while being a common phenomenon in central Italy in general, can lead to iconic expressions such as “il mi’ babbo” (my father).

Finally, let’s touch briefly on the verbs. Fare (to do) and andare (to go) both have a regional form for the first person singular in the present tense: fo instead of standard Italian (io) faccio, and vo instead of (io) vado.

The last feature I’m going to mention is the loss of infinitival ending -re, which results in such forms as perdere --> pèrde, or andare --> andà (this is quite common in central Italy as a whole).

Lexicon

I won’t really elaborate on this, as my knowledge of these regional varieties is limited, but of course there are words you’re more likely to see used in Tuscany than elsewhere, such as babbo for papà (”dad”), ghiaccio/a meaning ghiacciato/a, molto freddo (”freezing cold”) or the demonstrative prounoun codesto, now obsolete in standard Italian, used to identify an object far from the speaker, but near the listener.