National Post (National Edition)
Keeper of a dying Italian dialect
SARNIA, ONT. • In the afternoons, the round tables at the Dante Club are used for Scopa. It is a vexing card game, played so intensely by the older gentlemen at this volunteer-run bocce hall here, that management has put up signs: “No foul language.”
The forbidden curse words, some of them at least, are from an ancient dialect.
It is called Ciociaro and it comes from a region in Italy known informally as Ciociaria — a cluster of towns in the hills of southern Lazio, between Naples and Rome. Curiously, the dialect has gained a foothold here in this southwest Ontario town’s community of immigrants who came from Ciociaria.
But the dialect is dying. The people who brought it here are getting old; and their children aren’t using it. So Michael Iannozzi, a Sarnia-born linguistics student whose grandparents came from Ciociaria, is devoting his PhD work at Western University to recording his hometown’s specific brand of the dialect before the ones who speak it are gone.
Ciociaro is a so distinct that someone who speaks only formal Italian can barely understand it, save for a few common words here and there. Iannozzi’s sister, he said, spent months overseas learning Italian, hoping she could communicate with her grandmother, who speaks the dialect.
“Grandma had no idea what she was taking about,” he said. “My grandma was like, where did you send her?”
The dialect is likely headed for extinction in Italy, too. Since the 1950s, television and an improved national education system have infused formal Italian into the rural villages of Ciociaria. The young people there rarely speak the dialect anymore.
The encroachment of formal Italian has led to a splintering of the dialect — so there’s not a single version of Ciociaro. Instead, the dialect changes slightly from town to town, depending on the level of exposure to formal Italian, according to Gianni Blasi, a retired Italian linguistics professor from Ciociaria. Towns in the valleys, where the main roads run through, have seen much more outside influence then the towns secluded on hilltops, he said.
“When you move from town to town,” Blasi said, “you realize something’s changing, something’s going on.
“It’s a heritage, which is slowly, slowly, slowly being watered down. And in a few years it will start evaporating. It’s a slow but irreversible process.”
For Iannozzi, it all means that the version of the dialect he’s studying in Sarnia could be better preserved than it is in Italy, since it hasn’t been constantly bombarded by formal Italian. It’s as if the dialect is frozen, he said.
After the devastation of the Second World War, Italians looked outside of the country for work. When one immigrant landed in Sarnia, they were allowed to sponsor a friend or relative to join them. Through that chain migration, Sarnia ended up with an Italian immigrant population almost exclusively from Ciociaria. In fact, of the 2,400 immigrants who came to Sarnia in that period, 1,000 are from the Ciociaria region, according to one estimate from the 1990s.
Because the majority of the people who came from Ciociaria had little education, they didn’t have the opportunity to “lose their dialect,” Iannozzi said. To test the theory, Iannozzi is planning travel to Italy to interview Ciociaro speakers there, and compare that version of the dialect to the one in Sarnia.
It’s not likely that the language in Sarnia is completely unadulterated, however. Constant exposure to Canadian English has produced its own set of changes. Since most came from rural Italy in the 1950s, the dialect has adopted some English words for modern things that weren’t around at the time.
“They have no one bringing in those words that they didn’t pick up,” Iannozzi said. “So there’s just gaps. And those gaps get filled with English, or what they call Italiese — these English words that you make sound Italian-ish.”
So, the word “garage” becomes “garagio.”
There are pockets of immigrants from Ciociaria elsewhere in Canada, including in Windsor and Toronto. But Sarnia’s tight-knit community of Ciociaro speakers means it’s less likely that other Italian dialects, from other immigrants, have infiltrated.
Iannozzi has a more practical reason for focusing on Sarnia: His grandparents were among the wave of Italians who settled here in the late 1950s.
“They hear my last name and they say, ‘Well, OK, we’ll see what this person’s about,’” he said. “It’s allowed me to have lot of access that I wouldn’t have had to a community that generally just doesn’t really talk to English people.”
He hopes to interview 100 people in Sarnia, and catalogue their photos, letters, recorded interviews and stories in Western University’s Archive of Dialects and Languages. So far, he’s interviewed 38. Each interviewee, including Iannozzi’s grandmother, reads from a long list of words designed to highlight the differences between Ciociaro and formal Italian. (One of the most noticeable differences is that the sound for V in Ciociaro sounds like a W, so the word for wine — vino — sounds like wino. Other words, however, are completely different from formal Italian.)
“It gets pretty personal,” Iannozzi said.
Most of the people he has interviewed knew his late grandfather. One man sends produce from his garden with Iannozzi to give to his grandmother. Several of the people he has interviewed have since died.
“As a kid, it was always hard to talk to my grandparents, because of the language barrier and because they came from such a different experience from anything I understood,” he said. “To be honest, until I was about 16 I didn’t really appreciate it.
“Part of the work that I do is kind of absolving myself of not respecting it as much as I should have.”
“It’s like he’s holding onto his heritage,” said Caroline di Cocco, a former Ontario Liberal MPP from Sarnia, who has helped Iannozzi make connections in the first-generation immigrant community. She was born in Ciociaria, immigrated to Canada when she was six and has written at length about the Italian diaspora in her region. She said Iannozzi’s fascination with his roots is part of a larger trend in the third generation.
The Italian-Canadian community in Sarnia has swayed between two cultures for three generations, she said. The first seemed to have held onto their dialect and to centres like the Dante Club as a bulwark against a sometimes hostile EnglishCanadian mainstream culture. But the second generation dealt with those pressures differently, trying to fit in with their schoolmates.
“My mom made homemade bread because we couldn’t afford to buy it,” di Cocco said. “And she’d make cutlets or something and put them in. I didn’t have peanut butter and jam. You’re embarrassed, you wanted to fit in.
“It took a long time to accept the fact that I’m both (Canadian and Italian).”
Most of the second generation only used the dialect to talk to their parents, if they learned it at all. Few in the third generation can speak it. But they’re trying to re-embrace that culture, though it isn’t something they grew up with. The dialect, however, will die with the first generation.
“It’s quite sad, for me,” di Cocco said. “It was how thousands and thousands of people expressed themselves for hundreds of years. And now it’s irrelevant, unimportant.
“But we are important.”