Salentino

The Salentino dialect is the traditional vernacular of the southern Italian provinces of Lecce, Brindisi and part of Taranto known more commonly as the Salento; the extreme southern part of the region of Puglia or the 'heel' of the Italian peninsula.

For socio-political reasons Salentino is usually considered a dialect of Italian, since speakers do not consider themselves as anything but ethnic Italians, though linguists classify it as a dialect of the separate Sicilian (or 'Extreme Southern Italian') language, much in the same way as Southern Calabrian. Salentino thus shows more similarities to the latter dialect and the dialects of Sicily itself than it does to the nearer dialects of central and northern Puglia and Basilicata, which are rather varieties of the Neapolitan or 'Inner Southern Italian' dialect continuum.

The traditional area where Salentino is spoken are the aforementioned province of Lecce, much of the southern part of the province of Brindisi and the southern part of Taranto province.

History

The Salentino dialect is a product of the different foreign powers and populations that have washed over the peninsula over the centuries; Greek, Byzantine, Lombard, French, Spanish, Albanian and Arabic influences are all present in the modern dialect.

During the Middle Ages, the area was home to both Romance-based dialects - the precursors to the modern Salentino - and Greek-based dialects in roughly equal measure. So while much Salentino vocabulary is French or Spanish in origin, it has also taken on much Greek lexis as well due to this bilingual situation that existed for many centuries.

The areas of Greek speech have retreated over time, but the Salento remains one of two areas of southern Italy, the other being southern Calabria, where the Griko dialect can still be heard in some villages (today known collectively as the Grecia Salentina).

Characteristics

The term "Salentino" should be considered a general word to describe the various Romance vernaculars of the Salento peninsula rather than a term to describe a unified standard language spoken throughout the area. Indeed, in common with most other Italian dialects there is no agreed standard on spelling, grammar or pronunciation, with each locality and even generation having its own peculiarities. What unites the various local dialects of the Salento are their shared differences from the dialects further north in Puglia, such as the Barese dialect, and their similarities with other Extreme Southern Italian dialects in southern Calabria and Sicily.

One of the major phonetic differences between Salentino and various Pugliese dialects is that the latter tend to voice consonants that were originally unvoiced in Latin. In the dialect of Bari, for example, the standard Italian "cantare", 'to sing', becomes something like "candare", "ancora", 'again', becoming "angora". This typically Southern Italian characteristic is not found in Salentino.

Another typical feature of Salentino is the pronunciation of the Latin (or Italian) "-ll-" as the retroflex consonant "-ddh-", a "d" pronounced with the tongue curled backwards on the roof of the mouth and a sound more familiar to English-speakers as a mark of an accent from India.

Thus the standard Italian "cavallo", 'horse', becomes "cavaddhu" in Salentino. The resort town of Gallipoli is "Gaddhipoli" in local speech. This is a feature shared with other varieties of Extreme Southern Italian, such as the Sicilian language, and is not found in any other language native to Europe.