Languages and dialects of Italy

What brought up the idea for this website?

From an initial, more purely scientific interest in Italian dialectology, I realised that the exclusive study of linguistics was no longer sufficient in my path. This is why I decided to dedicate myself to a proper study of the minority languages of my country, in order to experience and speak them directly. I started to look for material on the Internet and indeed, scouring through the many search engine results, found various websites and documents that were accessible completely for free. Unfortunately, many of these websites do not appear among the first results due to a lack of web traffic.

Through the serial accumulation of all these resources I thought how nice it would have been to find a website where one could find all the various resources on the languages of Italy in one place. In fact, I spent so much time looking for all these things that I realised that this could be a nice service. An aid to those who, as passionate as I am about the minority languages of Italy - but not so stubborn in looking for authentic material - have abandoned their own path to approach the Italian linguistic heritage.

What does this site offer?

This site offers various links to free websites and PDFs online that can be used as support material to learn the languages and dialects of Italy. There is no intention to deal with a scientific dialectological approach in these pages, this is not the right place for such content. This site is for those who want to learn to speak these languages, not for those who want to study their linguistic aspects and describe them. Faced with the difficult accessibility of some materials, I am trying to fill this gap.

Perhaps not all sources will be the best of the best for learning - perhaps some sources will not be very reliable. Unfortunately for the languages of some areas, there is not a rich bibliography and/or sitography. Very often within the same language you will find, for example, different ways of writing due to the absence of any real standardisation. Some of these languages are predominantly oral, although there is a minority of speakers who use them in a written way but without an orthographic standard. While other languages have received a real standardisation, this standardisation is not always welcomed or even is rejected by the speakers in several cases.

My hope is to spread the contents of this website as widely as possible and to try to help potential users. If you find a source that is not very reliable - or even full of errors - among the resources proposed on the site, feel free to contact me at (info@linguedialetti.it). I will gladly respond to all of you. I will add material to this website according to your possible comments and requests and I thank you in advance for your cooperation.