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The poetry and socio-linguistic scholarship of Crescenzo Del Monte (Rome, 1868-1935) represent an important contribution to the understanding and preservation of Giudaico-Romanesco, the dialect of the Jews of Rome. Del Monte's assertion that Giudaico-Romanesco represents the closest living descendent of the spoken language of Ancient Rome and the medieval Italian vernacular of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, came into irreconcilable conflict with the anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and dialectophobic policies of the regime as the Fascists took control of Italy and exercised ever stricter control over cultural production. Del Monte's work remains fundamental to an understanding of the culture and language of the Jews of Rome in the decades leading up to and following their political emancipation.

Literature in dialect is often viewed as a 'minor' since it is written in a marginal language. Since the emergence of a growing number of neodialect poetry in Italy, the parity of vernacular poetry and poetry written in standard Italian has been put into question. This dilemma has particularly affected translators since translation from dialect must be able to reflect the dialect's uniqueness and diversity. However, it is nearly impossible to render in translation even part of the connotative richness of the original words. The success of translation thus lies in the linguistic and literary skills of the translator.

The gome graythely him grette and bade gode morwen; The kyng lordelye hym selfe of langage of Rome, Of Latin corroumppede all, full louely hym menys. (lines 3476-8) (The man greets him properly and wished him a good morrow; the king speaks to him himself, lordly and most graciously, in the language of Rome, all Latin corroumppede.) Burrow also observed two linked analogues in Fouke le Fitz Waryn, an AngloNorman prose romance worked up, in the early fourteenth century at the latest, from a lost verse predecessor.6 Landing on an island near Orkney, Fouke and his companions meet a young shepherd, who Tes salua de un latyn corumpus' (greeted them in a latyn corumpus)? In translating the text, Thomas E. Kelly opts for very bad Latin' and 'bad Latin' in these two cases, respectively.10 The editors of the poem's standard referencing edition offer uncouth dialect, jargon' in their glossary.11 H. J. Chaytor took the two appearances of this phrase in Fouke as evidence of a mercantile, perhaps maritime lingua franca of altered Latin.12 Slightly more recently, W. Rothwell has adopted this lingua franca idea more positively, reasoning from Fouke onwards to the Man of Law's Tale rather than from Chaucer back to Fouke.13 Jonathan Hsy has written a wide-ranging and fruitful parallel reading of mercantile activity and multilingualism across the Man of Law's Tale and the different narratives in the Constance tradition that lies behind Chaucer's poem. A. C. Spearing, for instance, treats it as an example of Chaucer's 'sense of historical change in language', while R. A. Shoaf regards it as a detail added 'for the sake of verisimilitude'.18 When Nevill Coghill produced his twentieth-century verse translation of the Tales, he rendered the line as 'Latin she spoke, of a degenerate kind'.19 However, additional uses of the phrase 'Latin corrupt', not known to Burrow, show that in the Man of Law's Tale the phrase 'Latyn corrupt' probably indicates neither inept or degenerate Latin, nor a lingua franca, but rather an Italian vernacular. Destroyed in purity, debased; altered from the original or correct condition by ignorance, carelessness, additions, etc.; vitiated by errors or alterations.'20 The MED too cites this line as its first quotation for the use of'corrupt' to mean 'faulty, incorrect (language)'.21 Although the OED and the MED are excellent tools, they both draw deeply, disproportionately, on Chaucer.22 Chaucerian arguments rooted in some specific senses offered in these dictionaries therefore risk entering a logical hall of mirrors, in which scholars read Chaucer using definitions which themselves reflect readings of Chaucer.

The unfinished tract seems to be abandoned because it concerns so many things at once: the history and nature of human language, language families and Italian dialectology, “mother tongue” versus grammar, the role of poetry and poets in defining language, rules for poetic practice, the possibility of a national idiom, and the syntactic form and poetic function of an illustrious vernacular. “Even as it is being given definition, the vulgare illustre slides from theological transcendence to the immanence of human knowledge and power, to the formal marginality of poetic style,” as Albert Ascoli observes.11 This shifting scale makes its referents worthy of study, as Dante imagines the role poetic eloquence can play in response to regional and irredentist narcissism, whose violent consequences continue to abound in the absence of authority. 13 Yet it only drew critical attention from Dante scholars in the twentieth century, giving rise to competing and complementary interpretations: literary-polemical (rivalries between poets), geographic (focused on the political need for linguistic unity that nonetheless implies variety), historiographic (considering Florentine, Sicilian-Tuscan, and Bolognese schools of poets), and linguistic-rhetorical (focused on the transformations in philosophical studies of language, and technical and metrical analyses of song).14 The two books of the treatise elicit divergent interpretive emphases: the second is read as Dante’s metapoetic exegesis of stylistic experiments in vernacular poetry (Contini, Mengaldo), while the first focuses on the philosophical essence of language, the history of human language from Adam to Babel, the variability of post-Babelian idioms, and a utopian ideal of an illustrious vernacular, one with robust political implications (Tavoni, Rosier-Catach). 15 The treatise continues to delineate a broader turn towards the vernacular during the Latin Middle Ages, if not a defense of Dante’s transformative and self-legitimating decision to write the Commedia in “Italian,” rather than relying on the authority accorded to Latin high culture.16 The first book introduces the doctrine, its novelty, as well as “the identification of the foundation (subiectum) of the doctrine, the natural vernacular [. . .] alongside which it is noted that some communities have a secondary and artificial language (gramatica)” (Mengaldo, ED, 404).

The details surrounding his death are murky and littered with conspiracy theories, but it is known to have been a brutal end, and there is an undeniable factor of homophobia in the perpetrator's motivations. Because of Pasolini's known homosexuality, and his often openly outrageous lifestyle in a largely conservative, Roman Catholic nation, after attending the roundtable discussion on the poetry, politics, and provocations of Pasolini's cinema, I reached out to the chairperson, Jane Mills, as I found the discussion a little tame. Pasolini takes liberties with Boccaccio's text, losing the original frame of one hundred tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men as they isolate just outside Florence to escape the Black Death, reducing the original one hundred stories to nine, transferring the action from Florence to southern Italy, and changing the language to the Neapolitan dialect. Doubtless, Giotto would have appealed to Pasolini as a role model: according to the Renaissance artist biographer Giorgio Vasari, Giotto innovated \"the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life. . .\" In a highly creative scene in the Pasolini/Giotto/pupil story, Pasolini gives us a montage in which the interior of the church is transformed into what looks exactly like a film set, and the painter/pupil/director shows an insistent attention to detail: we see close-up shots of paint being mixed, scaffolding being dragged to center screen, the painter cheekily daubing a blob of paint on a young assistant's nose, and a close-up of the artist's face gazing transfixed by the faces of people in the local market as he holds up his fingers to his eye to form a \"frame\" in which to view them—much as film directors do when setting up a shot.

Pasolini has ripped open the dusty old tomes of the Tales—which, sadly impenetrable to many, have sat on forgotten shelves in libraries for decades—and sheds light on what these stories were designed to do. \"1 That he cast himself in the role of Chaucer tells us how important Pasolini viewed the continued use and preservation of the vernacular—something he had done since his first book of poetry, Poesi a Casarsa (1942) written in the Friulian dialect, and his first two films, Accattone (IT, 1961) and Mamma Roma (IT, 1962), in which the Romanesco dialect of the slum dwellers of Rome breathes life into the characters. The law enforcers chase him for stealing food, and, with shades of Chaplin, he evades them while they go head-over-heels into the river. According to the director, the trilogy was created as a celebration of life.

The so-called Triveneto is -- for economical, anthropological, sociolinguistic, and literary reasons -- a particular case within the Italian survey. In the twentieth century alone this macroregion has seen a unique and uneven development that has changed sometimes destroyed its previous anthropological and linguistic (i.e. dialect) continuity. This paper explores the consequences and relationships between this particular 'sviluppo disuguale' and the literary production of several poets from this area during the past century. It outlines the dialectics among different sociolinguistic oppositions in order to sketch a model helpful in understanding the special tension between national language and dialect(s) in Italian contemporary poetry. Adapted from the source document

The old Albanian literature (mid-16th – mid-17th century), which includes the philosophical–theological treaty Cuneus prophetarum by Pjetër Bogdani (Padua, 1685), was born and developed as a literature mainly of religious content for the needs of the Catholic religion. Regardless of the topic, this literature was created in a certain historical, cultural and social environment, namely that of northern Albania and the Albanian population that lived there. Hence, the data provided in this book constitutes an invaluable source through which we have the possibility of learning more about the way of life and the functioning of this part of Albanian society of that time. Interesting data on the situation of the Albanian language of that time is to be found in the preface of this work. The author urges Albanians not to let their language and science degenerate, but just as other nations do, they should make efforts concerning its evolution and development. But the alarm for destructing the mother tongue is linked with author and his contemporaries’ high conscious more than with the reality. In fact, Bogdani´s work itself proves that Albanian at that time had expressive possibilities equal to those of the Italian language. Not only the expressive and lexical richness, but the syntactic structure of phrases shows a high degree of development and elaboration in the Albanian language of that time. Examining the foreword of the book, we can learn that efforts were being made to unify the language and to develop one literary variant based on the dialect of the town of Shkodra. Bogdani also tried to adjust the language of his work according to this town’s dialect. Relations with Italian and Croatian intellectuals are clearly demonstrated in dithyrambic poetry and in the dedications at the beginning of the book. In this work, we also find data on Albanian mythology. Cuneus prophetarum occupies a special place in Albanian literature, because it is the first original work of prose, unlike previous writings, which were mainly translations.

From its very inception, Italian as a vernacular literature was the creation of translingual authors -- ie, authors who write in more than one language or an adopted language (Kellman, Translingual). The three most illustrious pioneers of Italian poetry and prose -- Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio -- also wrote eloquently in Latin. In the eighteenth century, Giacomo Casanova and Carlo Goldoni each composed his memoir in French. In the twentieth century, Italo Svevo came to Italian, the medium of all his fiction, most notably the novel La Coscienza di Zeno (1923) as his third language, after his native Triestine dialect and German. The contemporary Italian novelist Francesca Marciano, however, who has published all four of her books to date in English, represents a remarkable case of translingualism. A study of her Anglophone fiction, in which language itself is often an explicit theme, bears witness to extraordinary, self-conscious linguistic transformation.

This article focuses on a significant Sicilian folk prayer, 'U Vebbu' (The Word). It shows that this important oral tradition was not based on an 'illogical extract of random religious ideas', virtually assembled by the folk imagination, but was the direct result of the impact that different medieval cultures had within southern Italy during and subsequent to the Crusades. This ultimately indicates that significant elements of folklore are selectively adopted on the basis of what carries meaning or has a perceived benefit, due to the people's history within their living environment.