Italian accents, dialects and regional varieties — what’s the difference?

 

A few weeks ago I spent a week in Scotland. It was a wonderful trip: interesting cities, beautiful landscapes and, surprisingly, quite a lot of sunshine. The people in Scotland are warm and friendly, but for the first few days I had some difficulty understanding them when they spoke. I wasn’t very familiar with the Scottish accent.

That experience switched on my teacher’s radar. I thought about the people who study with me, and the times they’ve struggled with Italian accents. So I decided to write this article.

Three different things: dialects, regional varieties and accents

First, let’s clear something up. People often confuse three things that influence each other but are actually very different.

Dialects in Italy are regional languages related to Italian but independent from it. For many people in Italy, their dialect and Italian are used in different contexts — usually dialect with family, Italian at work. When they meet a tourist or someone learning Italian, they won’t use the dialect.

Regional varieties of Italian are ways of speaking the language that include some words typical of a specific region, not widely known elsewhere in Italy. This happens especially with the names of vegetables, cheeses and kitchen objects. In these cases too, people in Italy are generally sensitive enough not to use overly regional vocabulary with a foreigner.

Then there are accents — and that’s where things get more interesting.

What Italian accents actually are

An accent is a set of phonetic characteristics that shape the way people speak a language. Italian accents are varied, numerous and often very recognisable. Very few people speak without any accent at all — usually only journalists and actors who have trained in diction. Everyone else has an accent, even if they’re often not aware of it themselves.

Here are two concrete examples. In the Florence area, the “c” sound at the beginning of a word is aspirated — it’s pronounced like the English H in “Harry”. So la casa (the house) becomes la hasa. The Neapolitan accent has a particular way of pronouncing the S sound, which sometimes sounds like the SH in “shampoo”. So la scuola (the school) becomes la shcuola.

As you can see, these are fairly small differences. Italian phonetics is relatively straightforward overall, and accents are recognisable but rarely difficult to get used to.

Do I need to study Italian accents?

Not straight away — and perhaps never in a systematic way. Understanding accents in depth would require fairly technical phonetic concepts, and more importantly, the issue resolves itself through habit, not through theory.

If you travel to Calabria or the valleys around Bergamo, you might find it hard to follow the locals at first. But day by day, your ear adjusts. Exactly as mine did in Scotland.

If you want to explore this in an enjoyable way, there’s one excellent resource: Italian cinema. Accents in films matter for the credibility of the characters — a woman from a working-class neighbourhood in Naples and a wealthy man from Milan can’t speak with the same accent. Watching a few Italian films is a natural and enjoyable way to train your ear.

The most important thing

In real life, if you meet an Italian with a very strong accent, theory won’t help you. What will help you is calmness. And to have that calmness, you need to study with pleasure and without anxiety — which is exactly how we work together.

Want to build that kind of calmness with Italian? Write to me or book a free introductory call — let’s talk about it.