Too Quick

[Steve Graham]

As the (recent) proud owner of a satellite dish, I have most Italian channels here in the chilly bogs of Ireland. I can't undertand a word spoken in Sicily. How much faster than the average Italian do they speak?!

(It's not even dialect. Even standard news programmes.)

[bosco]

You're not the only one with this difficulty! And it's not only Sicilians...

And dialect can be a problem as well. Reminds me of watching the film Gomorrah, which I enjoyed a great deal. But it was humiliating to find that almost the only Italian I understood fully throughout the film was spoken by Chinese characters rather than Campanians.

[juliancoll]

Bosco - don't worry - most Italians have great difficulty understanding Neapolitan as well. By the way, Sicilian and Neapolitan - these are not strictly dialects - but languages within their own rights - a lot of the words have no connection with standard Italian and have a lot more in common with Greek and Arabic.

[Annamaria]

My mum is Roman and my dad Sicilian; soon after they married my dad asked my mum to make him some "sfinci". She looked at him askance and said "Whaat?" He told her to follow his instructions because he had seen his mum make them and could tell her what to do. So she did and he did and halfway through she realised she was making "bigné" - profiteroles. Over the years, and they have been 63 and counting, my parents have enjoyed not understanding each other's "local" words!

[Steve Graham]

What I was referring to was that even when the WORDS are standard Italian, the speed of delivery makes it hard to understand. It seems to be a general Southern thing.

(I'm well aware that there are numerous minority languages in Italy - mostly callled "dialects" of Italian, but many of them are as different from Italian as, say English is from German. I'm fascinated by it all. There's a good starting point to get information on Wikipedia: Languages of Italy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia )