The Neapolitan LANGUAGE (or “dialect”?)
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This video is all Neapolitan ('O Nnapulitano), a regional language of Italy, spoken by millions of people in the southern part of the country. In this video I examine its features that are similar to Italian and other Romance languages, as well as its own features that make it different.
Special thanks to Mara Mautone for her suggestions and Neapolitan audio samples!
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Creative Commons images in this video:
Author: Antonio Ciccolella
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Author: Dbachmann
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Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:57 Samples of Neapolitan and Standard Italian
01:47 General info about Neapolitan
02:34 Shared features with other Romance languages
03:51 Video sponsor: Ground News
05:37 Distinct features – pronunciation
07:24 Distinct features – grammar
09:13 Distinct features – vocabulary
11:10 Basic phrases in Neapolitan
18:06 Final thoughts
18:37 A question for the audience
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Of course if you don’t also dedicate a video to Sicilian which is a language with more than 5 varieties and dialects as many as there are municipalities in Sicily… it makes you a little angry
@Rosso Bluactually the sicilian language also comprehends the dialects of southern calabria and Salento.
Anyway it makes sense for him to have done a video about neapolitan first, since it has more speakers (being the second most spoken language in Italy with 7 millions of them (sicilian has 5 million)) and being arguably the second most influential italian language (after italian) influencing many terms of the Italian-American community, such as gabagool, mutsarell, arugula, fazool, rigott etc.
Also, every italian language changes from town to town, sicilian isn’t special.
Quando citavo le varietà…intendevo proprio calabrese e salentino👍🏼
(Tecnicamente è la prima lingua neolatina poetica d’Italia…la scuola poetica siciliana Federico II… E comunque bisognerebbe capire che le varietà insulari (e non) sono così diverse da parlare di gruppo “siculo-romanzo”…non si tratta solo diversità lessicali ma anche grammaticali:
Io italiano
Eju,jeu,je,j,iu,eu,ju,jo
(Solo per dire)
Oltre che per l’impostazione della frase e per il sistema verbale.
Non si tratta di chi è più speciale…ma di riconoscere il valore di un patrimonio che ci appartiene.
@Rosso Blu I would like to do it sometime, but the nature of my videos means that it always takes a long time for me to do any specific topic. Neapolitan has been on my list of next ten videos for over a year (ie. it took me over a year to make 10 videos).
@Langfocus PP kudotut
I hope there’ll be also a few samples of other dialects (expecially those of the pugliese variety) to show how diverse the language is
I’m from neapolitan origin but i’ve Always lived in Cilento where they speak another variant. I can show you some quick examples: hot caldo(italian) cavero (spelled cavr’: neapolitan from Napoli) cauro (cilentano), wet bagnato(italiano) ‘nfuso (neapolitan) ‘mbusso (cilentano) and so on, there’s so many. I personally can’t really speak cilentano, i speak neapolitan from Napoli (since my parents are from there) but throughout the years i Just learned some words.
P.s. a neapolitan and someone from Cilento can easily talk with one another with no problems, it’s practically the same language, Just some different words (but still recognizable)
As an Italian, I feel like Neapolitan has the right to be called a language, just as Sardinian is.
Linguisticamente parlando lo è, ed è già considerato tale da praticamente tutti i linguisti del mondo e associazioni come l’unesco (che lo hanno anche classificato come “a rischio”).
(Non il dialetto napoletano di Napoli però. La lingua napoletana comprende anche i dialetti pugliesi (tranne quelli salentini, abruzzesi, lucani, molisani, della Calabria del nord e del sud del Lazio e delle Marche)
It is, only Italian people generally call it a dialect, but it’s a political distinction not a linguistical one
Sono tutte lingue, perché dagli albori a oggi si sono evolute (e indebolite ma hanno mantenuto la loro arcaicità e divergenza rispetto all’italiano) stessa cosa non si può dire per il toscano e il romanesco…il toscano è un italiano vernacolare non più quello di Dante e il romanesco è andato perduto del tutto,oggi esiste il Romanaccio una forma vernacolare dell’italiano totalmente diversa dal romanesco che a suo tempo era una lingua effettiva con grammatica e peculiarità.
La cosa vergognosa è che hanno preso il napoletano e il sardo e hanno lasciato indietro tutte le altre lingue (di cui si hanno tra l’altro i resoconti linguistici nativi a fine 1800, con il regno di Italia tutti si stavano allarmando che di lì a pochi anni si sarebbero perse le lingue autoctone…come purtroppo dagli anni del fascismo a oggi è stato tutto in discesa…vedasi il siciliano riconosciuto dall’UNESCO come lingua a rischio ma non tutelata (e per siciliano si intendono più di 5 varietà linguistiche escluse quelle del continente…e capiamoci il siciliano è stata la prima lingua poetica d’Italia prima ancora di Dante)
@Nyko 921ed è lì che sbagliano. A Pescara e a Bari non si parla Napoletano
@Rosso Bluil siciliano dantesco sta al siciliano modernk quanto il suo volgare al fiorentino di oggi.
I find Neapolitan has very similar phonetics to Catalan. Not because of influence, just because it seems to be a common dychotomy, a romance language with few vowels and full voiced endings (like Spanish or Italian, mundo/mondo) surrounded by languages which are much more free with their phonetic development and much “lazier” (Catalan or Neapolitan, món/munno)
I’ve also thought that as well, coming from a Spanish speaker that has dabbled in both standard Italian and Catalá.
I think it can also be due to the fact that the kingdom of naples was part of the crown of aragon
On the other hand, as a northern Italian who speaks and understand to some extent his own regional language (Romagnol), I have to say that as far as grammar goes, Catalan has much more in common with the languages from the north of Italy than with those from the south: after all they’re all part of the same gallo-romance language, as opposed to the italo-romance to whom standard Italian and Neapolitan belong.
@Nicolás Gutiérrez I dont think so, catalan immigration was not really important save for a handful of nobles, and these traits are also found in other “peripherical” languages like Asturleonese or Venetian.
Oddly enough, while learning Italian (and also looking at some Neapolitan and Sicilian every now and then) I found that standard Italian tends to be closer to Catalan in its vocabulary while Neapolitan and Sicilian both lean closer to Spanish, even though similarity in pronunciation go the other way round.
I’m Sicilian, we speak a regional dialect/language quite distinct from Neapolitan especially in terms of phonology but at the same time we have many similarities in terms of vocabulary, so in general we can understand it quite well
Fun fact: the regional varieties from southernmost Italy (including Sicilian, Calabrese and Salentino) are known academically as Extreme Southern Italian*, which is a perfectly reasonable descriptive name but it’s also kind of fun to call a language ‘extreme’!
* Bear in mind that the “Italian” in “Extreme Southern Italian” is a geographical references (literally the ‘language varieties of the southernmost parts of the Italic Peninsula), it doesn’t imply that they are dialects of standard Italian. Most linguists would argue that Sicilian and Calabrese are dialects of their own regional language, just like Neapolitan.
As a Brazilin who speaks Italian I can say that SPANISH and Portuguese are WAY more similar than Napoletano and Italian. Hands down. I can understand some Spanish,. I understand almost ZERO Napoletano (even given I’m a native Speaker of Portuguse).
Ciao, vengo dalla Croazia, ho studiato italiano al liceo e ho parenti in Italia, i dialetti sono la ricchezza di ogni lingua, il problema è che noi che abbiamo studiato l’italiano “vero” non capiamo il dialetto, mentre il napoletano e il siciliano sono lingue a noi “sconosciute” e difficilmente riusciamo a capirle. Ho studiato anche inglese, ma non capisco lo scozzese
@Damir Hlobik si sono molto difficili da comprendere soprattutto se ascoltate. Scritte probabilmente le capiresti meglio ma anche in quel caso ci sono molte parole che in italiano non ci sono o significano altro, per esempio in siciliano per dire il verbo “guardare” diciamo “taliari” oppure per dire “piccione” diciamo “palumma” e “muccaturi” al posto di “fazzoletto”
@J Diego yes I knew it, let’s say that here in Sicily we take our language very seriously, also because it is one of the first to be formed from Latin. However, Sicilian and Calabrian are both dialects of the same regional language, the only problem is that unlike Neapolitan there is no standard form of Sicilian, each area has its own dialect and sometimes it can be very different from area to area (for example the dialect of Palermo and the dialect of Catania, although very similar, have very marked differences)
Thank you Paul for once again shedding light on another language that has had its rich heritage and culture repressed by linguistic nationalism, Nnapulitano is a sibling language to Italian just as all other Romance languages in Italy.
Forza Napoli !! Quei ragazzi de la curva B
@Al Taurelli do you live in Naples itself? Is the variety of Neapolitan dialects not immensely diverse due to lack of standardization? I’m not sure how this is incorrect given that Paul is a very thorough and trustworthy researcher typically. How do you feel this is incorrect
Thanks once again for undelining that what we call “dialects” are regional languages structurally separate from Italian. A fact that most Italians ignore.
However, since I’m from the North of Italy and my regional language is Emilian (or better, a peripheral Emilian variety sharing some features with Lombard, Ligurian and Piedmontese) I generally don’t understand Neapolitan except those words or sentences that became popular through tv shows.
are you from Piaseinza? 🙂
Wow Neapolitan is quite beautiful! To my ear it has a bit of a European Portuguese and Italian sound, but with a distinct and quite beautiful rhythm.
It might be due to the stressing that we european portugueses also do quite a lot. But from the sample in the video, and my week in Naples, to me as an European Portuguese it does not resemble my own language at all (what sometimes happen with some slavic languages I need to admit ahaha). But yeah, a non-native is less biased I guess!
@João Reis I am not a native, for me both of them sound like gibberish since I only know my native language, English and barely any French
Thank you so much for covering our beautiful language! As someone who lives there I can testify that it’s still quite commonly spoken but not by the middle/upper class since it’s considered “too vulgar”, although most neapolitans (me included) use it the most when angry or cussing at others
I must disagree with that. I have two Neapolitan friends who belong to the well-to-do middle class and they speak Neapolitan perfectly well. They use a perfect Italian with me, and they use a pure, sophisticated Neapolitan when in Naples.
@idraote i see, but from my experience it has been as I said in the previous comment. Of course not every experience is the same
Considering the fact that modern Neapolitan has no standard since it’s not an official language and therefore is neither taught in schools nor used in any institution, you did an amazing job, I am blown away (I just disagree on minor details, but on the other hand you taught me things I didn’t even know, and I’m neapolitan!). Of course this also means that there is no standard spelling, and various different choices can be made as to how to write it.
As per your question for neapolitan speakers, I’d personally say that it’s very difficult to quantify how much we use neapolitan or standard italian. Think of standard italian and neapolitan as the two ends of a spectrum: depending on the context, they can and do get mixed 🙂
That’s so sad that there is no standard or writing system set up for this beautiful language.
Thank you, Paul. Incredible work you put into your videos! Happy to be supporting your work. For anyone interested, check out the link above and let us know if you have any questions.
Ive studied various romance languages, including Italian and I can confidently say I understand more than half of the Italian audio used in this video, but almost none of the Neopolitan. 😂
I hope in the future there will be more resources to learn this beautiful language
I took classes in Italian before going to Italy. I speak French. The classes were easy.
I end up in Naples with my Italian-speaking wife, and we were both left wondering if we’d had some kind of brain lapse. Neapolitan kind of *sounds* like Italian, but for a 3rd-language speaker, it definitely is not mutually intelligible.
All these years, I assumed it was just us. until now. Immediately on the first clip I recognized it.
So, I suppose we did have a brain lapse, in that it didn’t occur to us that they might not be speaking Italian.
Napolitain sure sounds close to Italian but the silent letters and the shift in pronunciation makes its musicality closer to French and Portuguese. It’s like Occitan in reverse.
I doesn’t sound like Portuguese at all, lol. I’m a native Portuguese speaker, I was able to understand some of the Italian but none of the napolitan.
@Voltorb I’m not talking about vocabulary or intelligibility but the tones and the phonemes of the language.
I love these videos. It’s probably very difficult to do, but I’d love to see more videos on other lesser known languages, specifically Australian languages like Pitjantjatjara or Native American languages like Crow or Shoshone.
Paul’s problem is finding native speakers to use for the example sentences.
And not just finding someone who _claims_ to speak it and doesn’t. He’s been burned by _that_ more than once.
There is a video about the Native languages of Mexico, like Nahuatl. Nahuatl is actually related to Shoshone. That may keep you satisfied until another Native American video is made.
@migue24 Yes, thanks for the comment. I’ve already watched all of his videos. Really the reason I ask for those two Native American languages is because I grew up in the area that they’re spoken. If he doesn’t get to them, that’s fine. It was just a request.
As a Brazilian, I feel like being a native Portuguese speaker didn’t help me to understand, but my knowledge of French and Romanian (Intermediate in both) helped me a lot to understand.
– I would be happy if you could remake the Basque and Maltese videos 😀
Why did you learn Romanian?
As a Brazilin who speaks Italian I can say that SPANISH and Portuguese are WAY more similar than Napoletano and Italian. Hands down. I can understand some Spanish,. I understand almost ZERO Napoletano (even given I’m a native Speaker of Portuguese).And no one would ague that Spanish and Portuguese are NOT different languages. And NOPE. Before leaning Italian I couldn’t understand spoken Italian AT ALL. a little bit of written Italian only.
@Voltorb why not? are you romanian? i need help 🥺
@Johnny Lynn Lee meu deus, isso é mt doido, duas linguas de mesma origem e mesmo assim tão diferentes.
Português e Galego são tão igualzinho lkkkk
My happiness as a Neapolitan after finally seeing your video is absurd, I’m extremely happy to see it gaining recognition, and now answering your question. I use Neapolitan in my everyday life when talking to friends or family that I know will understand me, Neapolitan has been repressed as a language for decades and it’s seen as a street language and often avoided in polite conversations, hence why I avoid using it with strangers most of the times. (It be relevant to mention that I do not live in Naples nor Italy anymore so that also affect my behavior towards it)
Neapolitan has remarkable analogies with Catalan too. The distance from Neapolitan to Italian is very similar to the one from Catalan to Spanish
As a Brazilin who speaks Italian I can say that SPANISH and Portuguese are WAY more similar than Napoletano and Italian. Hands down. I can understand some Spanish,. I understand almost ZERO Napoletano (even given I’m a native Speaker of Portuguese).And no one would ague that Spanish and Portuguese are NOT different languages. And NOPE. Before leaning Italian I couldn’t understand spoken Italian AT ALL. a little bit of written Italian only.
But catalan and spanish aren’t really related,well,they’re both western romance languages,but spanish is ibero-romance and catalan is gallo-romance,meaning that it’s more related to the languages of southern France like occitan
That’s because neapolitan was also influenced by Catalan when southern italy was under aragonese rule
As a Romanian, it is shocking to see some unexpected similarities between Neapolitan and my native language!
Word-final vowel reduction is probably what also caused a lot of feminine nouns in Romanian to end in -ă (a schwa), and probably verb conjugations as well. Neapolitan “mano” sounds a bit like Romanian “mână “, “chiam'” like “cheamă”.
Neapolian “Scusat” also looks a lot like Romanian “Scuzați” (the last i isn’t pronounced, it makes the ț = ts palatalized).
Possessive suffixes are also used when referring to family in Romanian, e.g. soacră-ta “your mother-in-law”, although it’s colloquial and not really polite, and there’s also different ways of shortening vocabulary for parents that changes politeness (taică-tu vs. tac-tu “your father”, maică-ta vs. mă-ta “your mother”, the last of which is considerably impolite).
It’s interesting though that in terms of vocabulary the examples from Italian were closer to Romanian in most of the cases (except probably for loanwords from French)
I always wondered why the Italian spoken around New Jersey and NYC was always quite “regional” compared to standard Italian. I figured it was because the majority of them descend from immigrants who were from southern Italy and Sicily, and the various dialects just merged over the generations to get what they now have, because they do NOT pronounce what the letters that the written equivalent possesses.
As a Spanish native speaker and Italian speaker, Neapolitan language seems so recognizable by two ways.
The fact that Neapolitan uses the relative verbs of “to be” like in Spanish surprises me.
I learned so much about this language, great video.