Ottante, Novante e di Oggi

We've settled on a local radio station here that has a sufficiently odd mixture of 80s synth pop, boy band ballads, classic soul and disco oddities to keep all parts of The Seffalice equally happy/unhappy. It's also useful for our picking up bits and pieces of Italian as the DJs' inane patter is very recognisable (does Chris Moyles run a correspondence course?) and they repeat themselves endlessly (and drop in occasional bits of English).

Everyone who calls up is asked "Come stai?" and then "Quanti anni hai?" and then they move onto the next person. Incisive stuff; if they don't ask the difficult questions who will?

We think it's called Radio 101. It plays music from "Ottante, Novante e di Oggi", as we're told every few minutes, and is on 94.1 FM if you're passing through Tuscany.

If you'd like to listen along with us from the UK they've an internet feed here.


I've been quoting overlong excerpts from Graham Robb's The Discovery of France throughout the blog, and today will be no exception as it's a brilliant book and I've not enough incentive to edit the sections down properly.

It seems appropriate, as I went stir crazy for adjectives yesterday, that today I go to the chapter on language, my favourite in the book.

Amongst many other things, it touches on the occasional concern of the various governing powers to impose the French of Paris onto the multitude of dialects that predominated across the rest of France into the last century. Meanwhile, the rest of France was managing perfectly well despite the preponderence of dialects.

By the end of the nineteenth century about fifty-five major dialects and hundreds of sub-dialects had been identified, belonging to four distinct language groups...Many more were unknown or unrecognized...

The known dialects of France can all be placed precisely on the tree of languages... Naturally, to a cross-country traveller who lept from one branch to the next, the effect was obscurity and chaos. The title of this chapter [O Òc Sí Bai Ya Win Oui Oyi Awè Jo Ja Oua] lists some of the major forms of “yes” in clockwise order, starting with Provence and ending with Savoy. But even this is a simplicfication. In mid-nineteenth century Brittany, a person who walked the five miles from Carnac to Erdeven could hear three distinct pronunciations of the word ya (“yes”): iè, ia and io. Along the Côte d'Azur, from Menton to Mons, fathers ten miles apart were called païre, père, pa, pèro and papo. As the sun travelled over the Franche-Comté, it changed its name to souleil, soulet, soulot, s'lot, soulu, sélu, slu, séleu, soureil, soureuil, sereil, s'reil and seroille...

However, while tourists and government officials far from home may have found it unintelligible, the dialects were effective over a very long range.

Mutual comprehensibility rather than isolation was the norm... [In Carcassone it was noted that] a person could travel twenty or thirty leagues (fifty-six or eighty-three miles) and understand this multiplicity of dialects despite only knowing one of them... Provençal shepherds who walked two hundred miles from Arles to the Oisans could converse with locals all along the route and, when they arrived in the Alps, negotiate the rental of summer pastures with people who, from a linguist's point of view, spoke a different language.

By the end of the nineteenth century, government policy had firmed up:

The eradication of patois as a first language became a cornerstone of education policy. Schoolchildren were punished for using words learned at their mother's knee... For the the non-French speaker on a school bench, the experience was often tramatic and humiliating... Years later, when education and an ability to speak French were taken for granted, the missionary efforts of the Third Republic would look to some people like a colonial campaign to erase local customs.

Robb isn't convinced by this "colonial campaign" though. Many teachers were local historians too and had no wish to see the local dialects die out. They often taught both dialect and French, but

...forced their students to use French, not because they want to stamp out minority cultures, but because they wanted pupils to pass examinations, to have the means of discovery the outside world, to improve the lot of their families...

The retreat of Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican and Flemish before the tide of French belonged to a much older, more complicated process of social and material change. Standard French was carried all over the country by conscription, railways, newspapers, tourists and popular songs.

Presumably many of the French dialects are still in use locally but I don't speak nearly enough French (i.e. any) to recognise when people might be speaking in dialects. In fact, I'm not at all sure of the definition of a dialect. The UK has a lot of regional differences for a fairly small country with a very well established national language, but while an accent may change the pronunciation of a word the spelling normally remains the same; does this come within the remit of a dialect?

Standard Italian is based on the Tuscan language originally disseminated via Dante's work, but apparently dialects are still spoken throughout the country, especially as you go further south. Being a very young country, regional identification is still very strong, often stronger than national identification. I think loyalties tend to run in the order town-district-region-nation, with a lot of local rivalries still festering, certainly if you go by the grafitti. Lucca is well represented on Pisa and Viareggio walls but is plainly too small for Florentine graffiti-ists to be concerned with.