Ebook: The Romagnolo dialect. A short study on its history, grammar and how it still survives

2008. - 5p.In Italy, dialects have always played an important role. Since the Middle Ages, these languages, which were born from spoken Latin and then evolved during centuries, were used to communicate and they were part of daily life. At least until the unification of Italy, dialects were spoken by the majority of people, since Italian was used only in written forms and spoken by a limited group of rich and intellectual people. Then, after the World War II, Italian gradually became the real national language dimming the usage of dialects among people, who began to consider dialects as languages spoken only by the poor and the ignorant. However, dialects are still important to truly understand the deep-rooted culture and traditions of Italian regions and nowadays it is not acceptable to consider them as inferior languages. Considering the fact that I am a native speaker of Italian and my experience with dialect, the subject of this essay will be the dialect of my region, Emilia Romagna. First of all, the history of the Emiliano-Romagnolo dialect will be presented. Consequently, linguistic features concerning grammar, morphology, phonology and the current situation of this dialect will be examined together with some mention of dialectal poetry and literature. Since in the region there are different varieties of a unique dialect, in this essay, in particular, the Romagnolo dialect will be taken into consideration. In the first part, however, there will be a presentation of the whole dialectal area.