The language of Italy is Italian,
but only since Italy became a single country. When Candido came to America,
Italy was many countries, with many related languages.
Prior to Giuseppi Garibaldi (1807-1882),Italy was a region, not a nation. Garibaldi, a Piedmontese like ourselves,
spoke Piedmontese as his native language, as did most of our ancestors,
after their arrival in Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries. (Before that,
we spoke French. See the History pages when I get them launched for details).
The languages of Italy are usually
called dialects, quite erroneously; they are as different from each other
as French is different from Spanish. Modern Italian is based on the Tuscan
language. The other languages, including Piedmontese, are dead or dying.
Here is an example of how different
they are:
The sentence means "I don't
know what this used to cost"):
Italian............... Non so quanto
questo costava.
Piedmontese..... I seu neng quant cust a custave.
Additionally, they sound quite different.
Piedmontese uses the French vowels and approaches French nasalized vowels,
e.g., "ang piemontèis" sounds more like French "en piedmontais"
than Italian "in piemontese."
Piedmontese, itself, had dialects.
(Ours is called canavèis). It was a literary language that
rivaled Tuscan in importance. Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago
boasts literally hundreds of volumes in Piedmontese.
Piedmontese is not quite dead, and
there are efforts to revive it. A couple years ago, rebels of the Liga Nord, a political party in Italy that favors re-dissection of the peninsula,
seized and captured Piazza San Marco in Venice. I was watching these dim
bulbs on CNN, and I suddenly sat upright--the banners that they carried
were in Piedmontese! So the radicals are trying to keep it alive. I won't
predict its future--or theirs.
To give you an example of the continuing
dichotomy in usage between regional speech and national language, consider
the Ricca household on Adams St. in Bartonville, around World War
I: Candido spoke and wrote Italian elegantly and well to his
siblings in letters, and sometimes at home, to Aunt Jennie. Otherwise,
he spoke Piedmontese to his wife, Rosa, as well as to the older children.
The younger children spoke English to their parents and to each other.
So there were three languages spoken at once in that house.
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