Lamezia Terme and Galati Mamertino (Province of Messina): a comparison of two languages

Language is a network of relationships that overcomes political and social fragmentation by acquiescing to a channel of mass communication. It was only in the course of the 10th century that a language that could be called unitary was really affirmed in this country. It's a language that today oscillates between the Florentine-Lombard and the Florentine-Romanesque, but doesn't present excessive difference between how it is written and how it is spoken, and which all Italians understand and use. In addition to the political unification of the country (1861) which contributed to this end result, there have also been legislative provisions such as mandatory instruction of Italian in elementary schools (1859) and in middle schools (1962), as well as events of great social import such as the great internal migrations of the '50s and '60s, the urbanization of the country, and the linguistic and cultural homogenization caused by mass media, particularly radio and television. In fact, even if in the immediate wake of the proclamation of Italian unity (1861) only 2.5% of the entire population spoke Italian, while the majority employed dialect, by the middle of the 1990s around 14-15% of Italians still spoke only dialect. Despite phonetic, morphological and lexical differences among these dialects, which make them really different languages, the dialects and the national language are completely equivalent with regard to linguistic value.

Any one as much as another constitutes a complete linguistic system capable of adequately fulfilling all the communication needs that they might be called to fulfill. The difference between Italian and the dialects, therefore, is not qualitative, but in how and where they are used. In fact, any given dialect is employed in a more limited environment than the national language, be it geographic or social. Until now, dialectologists have shown, in the immense variety of Calabrian speech, a massive presence of Greek elements in southern Calabria, and a prevalence of Latin elements in the northern section. This has induced scholars to talk of a Greek or southern Calabria, and of a Latin or northern Calabria, which coincide with the old administrative jurisdictions of Farther Calabria and Hither Calabria, which remained unaltered from the time of the Aragonese domination until the middle of the last century. The conclusions at which scholars of the Calabrian linguistic phenomenon have arrived have left unsolved the issue of those dialects that evolved in places between the two areas mentioned above.

Such is the case of the Lamezian dialect which, for the fact that it developed in a territory that forms a watershed between the two Calabrias, has assumed a physiognomy all its own which could not justify its placement among either the southern or northern Calabrian dialects. I think that all this study has been a "house of cards," the fruit of something obvious that merely feeds on itself. The work of Marcello Sensini has been enough to break up and dismantle common and closed-minded ideas that have prejudiced scholarly research, which now between lines of shadow and cones of light renders honor to the truth.

Among such a variety of dialects it is possible to delineate linguistic outlines that permit the classification of the southern Italian dialects into three groups:

1) the central-south dialects (the dialects of northern Lazio, Umbria, and Marches)

2) the middle-south dialects (the dialects of southern Lazio, Umbria, and Marches, of Abruzzi, Molise, Campania, Puglia, Lucca and northern Calabria)

3) the far-south dialects (the dialects of southern Calabria, including the Lamezian vernacular, the Salentine and the Sicilian)

The work of Marcello Sensini, fascinating from its very beginning, reorganizes the pieces on the linguistic chessboard as an object of linguistic study-specifically the Lamezian vernacular, whose plot is now redrawn and fans out around new solutions. Lexical and syntactical contiguity that has been confirmed between the Lamezian idiom (child of that Calabrian speech that Dante characterized as filthy and obscence in his De vulgari Eloquentia) and the idiom of Galati Mamertino or Montalbano Elicona (in the Province of Messina) have allowed us the shift the focus of attention outside of the Calabrian area. Useful in this regard would be the creation of a Lexicon of "archeo-linguistic recovery," be it Lamezian or Galatian, which would redeem "a cultural romance taken from words" (called for by the noted linguist S. Battaglia in page 5 of the preface of the Great Dictionary of the Italian Language).

The fact then that some scholars are reconsidering language as a collection of the seeds of our experiences and as a link between such experiences, the past, our historical roots, and prospects for cultural development (M. Alinei, Lessico come romanzo-i.e. "Lexicon as Romance," in the publication Lingua e Stile i.e "Language and Style," 1984, pp.135-155, and Paola Radici Colace, whose student I am, Cultura come lessico, lessico come cultura: I lessici tecnici e il recupero dell'aspetto materiale e scientifico del mondo Greco-i.e. "Culture as Lexicon, Lexicon as Culture; Technical Lexicons and the Recovery of Material and Cultural Aspects of the Greek World," in Cultura e Lingue Classiche, Terzo Convegno di aggiornamento e di didattica--i.e "Culture and Classical Languages, 3rd Conference on New Teaching Methodology, Palermo, October 29 - November 1, 1989, directed by B.Amata, Rome 1993, pp.193-205) can only encourage a work of this type.