AN INTRODUCTION TO piedmontese dialect
As readers (and staff) of an Italian magazine, it goes without saying that we all love Italian culture, and some of us might even be planning a trip to Italy soon. You may be thinking about visiting splendid Turin, or somewhere else in Piedmont, the beautiful region surrounded by the Alps. So to be prepared you may need ski equipment or your camera to take a selfie next to the huge Mola Antonelliana which dominates Turin’s skyline, but equally you should be come prepared for the fact that people there may speak to you in a noticeably different dialect. Take, for example, the following:
“Adiù, Andrea, com vala?”
“Ciàu, Anna! Mi i stagh bin, e ti? Com it ëstas?”
During your very first lesson of Italian your teacher might have told you: “We can start a conversation in Italian saying ‘ciao, come va?’ or ‘come stai?’ which means ‘Hi, how are you?’ and then we can answer ‘sto bene, e tu?’ meaning ‘I am fine, and you?’” But in Piedmont you may meet people who use unrecognisable words, with strange sounds and symbols (for example: ë) as shown above. Fear not, this is not an alien language, it is simply colloquial Piedmontese.
It is estimated that around 1 million people speak Piedmontese (piemontèis or lenga piemontèisa) and it is classified as a Romance language, included in the Northern Italian group (with Lombard, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Ligurian, and Venetian). The earliest known document written in Piedmontese (Sermons Subalpini) dates from the 12th century. Later, during the 17th and 18th century, it was used as a literary language and later on it formed its own grammatical standardisation. But the language that people speak now is noticeably different from the one that can be found in the old texts. This is due to the natural development and simplification of the language, and in actual fact today written Piedmontese has fallen out of usage, with the majority of people only able to speak it, and a further part of the population who can only understand it.
So, will you be able to after a while as well? It is not actually all that difficult to learn because it often resembles Italian. It may be even easier if you know a bit of French, since they share
lingua
By Giulia Ciaramita