How to learn an Italian dialect?

[drp9341]

Hello everyone!

I'm considering possibly studying a southern Italian dialect, (preferably Neapolitan, but I'm also open to the idea of Sicilian) with the intent to be able to understand it. I don't really care much about speaking it, but I would like to be able to understand it.

A few of my friends from Tuscany have parents from the south of Italy and thus they are able to understand, (and to a lesser degree,) speak these dialects. Because of this, they claim to be able to understand almost all of the southern Italian Dialects, (within reason.)

I also want this ability

My questions are:
1. Which (southern) Italian dialect has the most resources?
2. Which (southern) Italian dialect would work best for opening up comprehension to the rest of these dialects?
3. As a C1-C2 Speaker of Italian / Spanish, and ~B2 speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and French, (I've never studied Latin, however,) how difficult would it be to learn a Southern Italian dialect?

Thanks!

[iguanamon]

As someone who has learned some lesser studied and minority languages, with a Romance background, I can give some general advice. First, resources aren't going to fall into your lap as easily as they do with big languages, but they're probably out there. You just have to spend more time searching and sifting through them. They may not be the ideal resources, or the ones you would want in an ideal situation but with minority and lesser studied languages, you have to take what you can get. In the long run, it's worth it. It's an adventure and it will make you a better language-learner in the process. If I can learn Djudeo-espanyol/Ladino and St Lucian Kréyòl, if Bakunnin can learn Northern Khmer (which isn't even a written language), if Chung can explore Northern Saami, I see no reason why you can't learn an Italian dialect to some level. I only had two courses for Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol but they were sufficient given my background.

A quick web search shows that Alice in Wonderland and The Little Prince/O Princepe Piccerillo are available in Neapolitan translation. You can probably find a basic course, the Bible has been translated recently into the dialect. I also found this page Dialect Literature in Neapolitan. One other stop should be the wikipedia page for the language. Combine this with listening and seeking out opportunities to speak, listen and write and you should be fine. I'm sure there are forums, people who tweet in the language, perhaps even audio to download, but it's going to take work to find it. Searching through Italian would be the best way to find resources but I don't speak Italian. Your Romance background will of course be a great help to learning the language, especially with Italian. So get started "deep searching" and good luck. Sounds exciting!

Edit: Very basic course
Another very basic course A NAPOLI SI PARLA COSI'
There also seems to be quite a few resources on youtube

I used both Alice in Wonderland and The Little Prince to help with my Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol.

[sillygoose1]

If you want to just be able to understand and don't mind putting some work into it, I was going down the same path. Even though I only really focus on Roman and Tuscan dialects these days, there was a time I studied Southern ones.

What I did was go through Assimil's Corsican course. The reason I did this is because in my opinion, it has features present in various Italian dialects and it even helped me understand Romanesco better. I also remember some similarities with Neapolitan and Sicilian. Not to mention the fact that there are also quite a few similarities between Romanesco and Neapolitan such as the "gna" sound in words like "mangiare -> magna' "; "quando -> quanno", the use of "ce sta", the shortening of infinitives, esse / gioca'. If you don't want to go though the Assimil course, there are plenty of basic grammar pages that you will have to learn on Google Italia.

There are also Andrea Camellieri (sp?) books who writes passages in Sicilian. Luigi Pirandello I believe also has written plays in full Sicilian. The movie and TV series Gomorra is spoken in 100% Neapolitan which could help.

If you want to learn Romanesco, there are poems here: http://poesieromanesche.altervista.org/ + books by Giancarlo de Cataldo who writes in more modern language.

[YtownPolyglot]

If you've got friends with parents from southern Italy, you may want to start working your connections to find speakers of a suitable dialect. You may want to develop a little bit of spoken dialect to get people to produce that dialect for you. Otherwise, they'll code switch to a more standard variety of Italian or even English.

I noticed your location is NYC, so my strategy would have been to go to Little Italy or other neighborhoods with a concentration of Italians and search there. Italian shops and restaurants should be fertile hunting grounds.

[reineke]

You can start by googling your question in Italian.

Dictionaries and some online courses:

http://www.guidami.info/2010/12/lista-d ... i.html?m=1

http://www.navigaweb.net/2007/11/siti-p ... i.html?m=1

http://www.dialettando.com/dizionario/dizionario.lasso

"Neapolitan is a Romance language spoken by about seven or eight million people in southern Italy, especially in the city of Naples (Nàpule/Napoli) and in Campania and southern Lazio."

"Neapolitan has had a significant influence on the intonation of Rioplatense Spanish, of the Buenos Aires region of Argentina, and the whole of Uruguay.[8]"

Wikipedia

How hard is the Neapolitan accent to understand?

"Being a neapolitan grown up in northern Italy, I'd say you could understand Italian spoken with a light neapolitan accent if they slow down a little.

The real neapolitan dialect is a different league... Today I can barely understand people living in the Spanish quarter if they don't want me to understand. And I lived in another area of Naples with my grandparents till I was 5!"

https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g ... pania.html