Languages of Northern Italy
What makes Italy linguistically complex?
Which languages in northern Italy have legal status and protection?
How many German speakers are there in South Tyrol?
What historical factors contributed to linguistic diversity in the Alps?
How do languages influence each other in northern Italy?
Italy is a linguistically complicated country. At first glance this may seem surprising. Standard Italian is the country’s sole official language, and almost every citizen can speak it. However, look deeper and you will find a complex network of dialects, some of which are standardized as languages. Some of them are officially recognized and protected, but others are not. What’s more, the linguistic situation is a result of geographical, historical, and political factors that have affected the region for hundreds if not thousands of years.
An Indo-European meeting place
Although linguistic variety is characteristic of the Italian peninsula as a whole, the country’s northern regions are home to an especially complex situation. Northern Italy enjoys the distinction of being a meeting place for languages from three branches of the Indo-European family: Romance, Germanic, and Slavic. Languages and dialects of all three groups have long-established speech communities there.
The languages of northern Italy that enjoy some legal status and protection are French in Valle d’Aosta; German in some parts of Trentino–Alto Adige (known as South Tyrol in English); the Rhaetian dialect Ladin, also in Trentino–Alto Adige; Slovene in the province of Trieste; and Friulian (another Rhaetian dialect). Numbers of minority language speakers vary widely. There are an estimated 350,000 German speakers in South Tyrol, making up about 70 percent of the region’s population. Friulian, spoken in the area north of Venice, has more than 600,000 speakers. Other speech communities are much smaller. There are approximately 60,000 native speakers of Slovene, and speakers of Occitan, living in relative isolation in Alpine valleys, number some 20,000–40,000.
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Historical and geographical context
Linguistic minorities in the Alps are, broadly speaking, the result of migratory movements from neighboring countries or border shifts. The French and Franco-Provençal spoken in Valle d’Aosta date from a union with Savoy, but the German spoken in the same area dates from the 12th-century emigration of German sheepherders from the upper valleys of the Rhône. The German spoken in Trentino–Alto Adige dates back to Bavarian rule in the 5th century, whereas the German spoken in the provinces of Verona and Vicenza dates from a later colonization in the 12th century. The Slovene minority on the country’s eastern edge is a result of the 1920 Treaty of Rapallo, which drew a border between Italy and Yugoslavia.
Some of the Alpine areas have such a complex linguistic makeup that precise measurement of linguistic communities is impossible. In Friuli–Venezia Giulia, for example, many communes are bi-, tri-, and even quadrilingual, as in the case of Canale, where Slovene, Italian, German, and Friulian coexist. In certain Occitan-speaking parts of Piedmont, Italian is the official language, Occitan is spoken at home, and the Piedmontese dialect is used in trading relations with people from lowland areas.
Mutual influence
Since the region is home to many languages and dialects, there is a noteworthy amount of mutual influence and interference (that is, the influence of one language on another in the usage of bilingual speakers) among them. The Milanese dialect, for instance, which belongs to the Gallo-Italic subgroup, shows the phonological and grammatical influence of French and German. Friulian, which borders on areas that speak German and Slovene, has been influenced by both languages. In another direction, the local form of Slovene is heavily influenced on the grammatical level by standard Italian.