Florentine dialect
Dialect of Tuscan spoken in Florence
- 3 min read
- 3 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Syntax
A variant derived from it historically, once called la pronuncia fiorentina emendata (literally, 'the amended Florentine pronunciation'), was the official national language of the Kingdom of Italy when it was established in 1861. It is the most widely spoken of the Tuscan dialects.
Literature
Important writers such as Dante Alighieri, Francis Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio and, later, Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini wrote in literary Tuscan/Florentine, including Dante's Divine Comedy.
It became a second prestige language alongside Latin and was used as such for centuries.
Sign in to keep reading
2 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
Differences from Standard Italian
Florentine, and Tuscan more generally, can be distinguished from Standard Italian by differences in numerous features at all levels: phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon.
Perhaps the difference most noticed by Italians and foreigners alike is known as the gorgia toscana (literally 'Tuscan throat'), a consonant-weakening rule widespread in Tuscany in which the voiceless plosive phonemes , , are pronounced between vowels as fricatives , , respectively. The sequence la casa 'the house', for example, is pronounced , and buco 'hole' is realized as . Preceded by a pause or a consonant, is produced as (as in the word casa alone or in the phrase in casa). Similar alternations obtain for → , and → , .
Strengthening to a geminate consonant occurs when the preceding word triggers syntactic doubling (raddoppiamento fonosintattico) so the initial consonant of pipa 'pipe (for smoking)' has three phonetic forms: in spoken as a single word or following a consonant, if preceded by a vowel as in la pipa 'the pipe' and (also transcribed ) in tre pipe 'three pipes'.
Parallel alternations of the affricates and are also typical of Florentine but by no means confined to it or even to Tuscan. The word gelato is pronounced with following a pause or a consonant, following a vowel and if raddoppiamento applies (, un gelato, quattro gelati, tre gelati. Similarly, the initial consonant of cena 'dinner' has three phonetic forms, , and . In both cases, the weakest variant appears between vowels ( regione 'region', quattro gelati; la cena, bacio 'kiss'; this one actually comes from Latin basium and was never pronounced with an affricate, even though the modern standardized pronunciation, that was solely based on the spelling, accorpated the fricative with the affricates, hence putting an unetymological /t/ in pronunciation).
¹Notice that the form semo directly comes from Vulgar Latin *(es)sēmus, a form shared throughout most languages of Italy together with som~son, from the original Latin sumus (cf. Spanish somos). Despite this, cultured Florentine displaced all the original 1st person plural present forms with the subjunctive of the 3rd conjugation (-ire verbs, which have the subjunctive in -iamo), so that andamo, cademo, sentimo have all changed to andiamo, cadiamo, sentiamo.
Cases
Florentine uses the diminutive case -ino/-ine far more than Italian does, with many surnames also ending in -ini.
Article and pronouns
Florentine often abbreviates its articles and pronouns.
Unique phrases
The Florentine dialect has several unique phrases as compared the other Tuscan dialects.
Judeo-Florentine
A variety of Florentine known as Judeo-Florentine was spoken by the Jewish community of Florence. It was used in the 19th-century play titled La Gnora Luna, and is now no longer used by Florentine Jews.