How did the Swiss in Italy come to speak almost standard Italian? Between Tuscany and south Switzerland there’s quite a few dialects of Italian that could quite legitimately claim to be distinct languages they’re that different from Tuscan, yet the Swiss Italians speak, with a few changes, almost standard Italian, and not some incomprehensible dialect.
How did this happen? Was there a lot of Italian emigration into Southern Switzerland post unification?
Crap, posted in the wrong forum. :smack:
Moved MPSIMS --> GQ.
Well, Florentine/Tuscan began to gain ascendance as an official and literary language during the 14th century. Tuscany was the major power in northern Italy by the 15th century, roughly the same time that Ticino (the heart of Italian Switzerland) was conquered by the Swiss Confederation. Before that, it was dominated by the Duchy of Milan, and the Lombard language spoken there is still common in Italian-speaking areas, even as it declined under various moves to standardize the language in Italy. There has always been some pretty heavy immigration into Switzerland from Italy, and I’d guess this has reinforced Standard Italian as the base of Swiss Italian.
Swiss italians have their own dialects which differ quite a bit from standard Italien, but at school they learn and use standard Italian. It’s a bit like Swiss German and standard German - One is the language you use with friends and family, the other the language you use in writing, in official functions and to communicate with “outsiders”.
For what it’s worth, the term you should be using is “Italian-speaking Swiss,” not “Swiss Italians”:
In English, when we talk about a dialect X of a language Y, we say, “X Y.” So we talk about “American English,” “Australian English,” “Canadian French,” “Brazilian Portuguese,” etc. When we talk about the people of country X who speak language Y, we say, “Y-speaking X” (or sometimes just “Y X”). So we talk about “French Canadians,” “German-speaking Swiss,” “Spanish-speaking Americans,” etc. Admittedly, this is complicated by the fact that the term in Italian for Italian-speaking Swiss is “Svizzeri Italiani,” but it is less confusing if you don’t translate that literally into “Swiss Italians.”
The article in Wikipedia about Swiss Italian has some information about how it differs from standard Italian:
The literal translation would be “Italian Swiss” (plural).
Thank you.