Regional Italian

Regional Italian is a variety of Italian shaped by the vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammatical patterns of a particular region or local language. It ranges from regional accents to forms influenced by local dialects.

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Italian dialects: Romance languages and local varieties traditionally spoken across Italy, many of them distinct from standard Italian. Contact with these local speech forms supplies regional Italian with distinctive words and grammatical patterns.
Neapolitan Italian: A regional variety of Italian spoken in and around Naples, shaped by contact with Neapolitan. It illustrates how a local language can influence the Italian spoken in a major city.
Standard Italian: The standardized national variety of Italian used in education, formal writing, and public institutions. Regional Italian differs from the standard in local features while remaining Italian.
Italian unification: The nineteenth-century political process that united states of the Italian peninsula into one kingdom. Unification created a national state before most residents regularly spoke standard Italian.
Language contact: The interaction of languages when speakers or communities use more than one language. It explains how local languages influence Italian vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar.
Romanesco: The urban speech variety of Rome, historically shaped by Roman dialect and increasingly close to standard Italian. Its evolving relation to standard Italian shows regional speech changing over time.
Italian language: A Romance language descended from Latin and spoken chiefly in Italy and parts of Switzerland. Regional Italian is variation within the broader Italian language.
Manzoni's standardization of Italian: The effort associated with Alessandro Manzoni to promote educated Florentine usage as a model for national Italian. The chosen national model left regional speech patterns outside the standard.
Code-switching: The alternation between languages or language varieties within a conversation or utterance. Speakers may shift between standard Italian, regional Italian, and a local language.
Sicilian Italian: Regional Italian spoken in Sicily, influenced by Sicilian vocabulary, pronunciation, and usage. The island's local language gives Sicilian Italian a distinctive regional profile.