Neapolitan (autonym: ; ), is a Romance language of the Italo-Dalmatian branch spoken in most of continental Southern Italy. It is named after the Kingdom of Naples, which once covered most of the area, and the city of Naples was its capital. On 14 October 2008, a law by the Region of Campania stated that Neapolitan was to be protected."Tutela del dialetto, primo via libera al Ddl campano" ("Bill to protect dialect green-lighted") from Il Denaro, economic journal of South Italy, 15 October 2008 Re Franceschiello. L'ultimo sovrano delle Due Sicilie
While the language group is native to much of continental Southern Italy or the former Kingdom of Naples, the terms Neapolitan, napulitano or napoletano may also instead refer more narrowly to the specific variety spoken natively in the city of Naples and the immediately surrounding Naples metropolitan area and Campania region. The present article mostly deals with this variety, which enjoys a certain degree of prestige and has historically wide written attestations.Ledgeway, Adam. 2009. Grammatica diacronica del napoletano. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, pp. 3, 13-15Radtke, Edgar. 1997. I dialetti della Campania. Roma: Il Calamo. pp. 39ff
Distribution
Largely due to massive Southern Italian migration in the late 19th century and 20th century, there are also a number of Neapolitan speakers in Italian diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and Venezuela. However, in the United States, traditional Neapolitan has had considerable contact with English and the Sicilian languages spoken by Sicilian and Calabrian immigrants living alongside Neapolitan-speaking immigrants and so the Neapolitan in the US is now significantly different from the contemporary Neapolitan spoken in Naples. English words are often used in place of Neapolitan words, especially among second-generation speakers. In Naples the effect of Italian on Neapolitan has been similar due to increasing displacement of Neapolitan by the national language in daily life.
Classification
Neapolitan is a Romance language and is considered as part of Southern Italo-Romance. There are notable differences among the various dialects, but they are all generally mutually intelligible.
Italian and Neapolitan are of variable mutual comprehensibility, depending on affective and linguistic factors. There are notable grammatical differences, such as Neapolitan having nouns in the neuter form and a unique plural formation, as well as historical phonological developments, which often obscure the cognacy of lexical items.
Its evolution has been similar to that of Italian and other Romance languages from their roots in Vulgar Latin. It may reflect a pre-Latin Oscan substratum, as in the pronunciation of the d sound as an r sound (rhotacism) at the beginning of a word or between two vowels: e.g. doje (feminine) or duje (masculine), meaning "two", is pronounced, and often spelled, as roje/ruje; vedé ("to see") as veré, and often spelled so; also cadé/caré ("to fall") and Madonna/Maronna. Another purported Oscan influence is the historical assimilation of the consonant cluster as , pronounced (this is generally reflected in spelling more consistently: vs Italian "world"; vs Italian "when"), along with the development of as ~ ( vs Italian "drum"), also consistently reflected in spelling. Other effects of the Oscan substratum are postulated, but substratum claims are highly controversial. Neapolitan has mostly Italian language roots and an adstratum influenced by other Romance languages (Catalan, Spanish and Franco-Provençal), Germanic languages and Greek (both ancient and modern). The language had never been standardised, and the word for tree has three different spellings: , and .
Neapolitan has enjoyed a rich literary, musical and theatrical history (notably Giambattista Basile, Eduardo Scarpetta, his son Eduardo De Filippo, Salvatore Di Giacomo and Totò). Thanks to this heritage and the musical work of Renato Carosone in the 1950s, Neapolitan is still in use in popular music, even gaining national popularity in the songs of Pino Daniele and the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare.
The language has no official status within Italy and is not taught in schools. The University of Naples Federico II offers (from 2003) courses in Campanian Dialectology at the faculty of Sociology, whose actual aim is not to teach students to speak the language but to study its history, usage, literature and social role. There are also ongoing legislative attempts at the national level to have it recognized as an official minority language of Italy. It is a recognized ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee language with the ISO 639-3 language code of nap.
Here is the IPA pronunciation of the Neapolitan spoken in the city of Naples:
English Italian (standard) Neapolitan (standard) Neapolitan (diacritics) IPA (Neapolitan) Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.
Alphabet and pronunciation Neapolitan orthography consists of 22 Latin letters. Much like Italian orthography, it does not contain k, w, x, or y even though these letters might be found in some foreign loan words; unlike Italian, it does contain the letter j.
All Romance languages are closely related. Although Neapolitan shares a high degree of its vocabulary with Tuscan-derived Italian, the official language of Italy, differences in pronunciation can make the connection unrecognizable to those without knowledge of Neapolitan. The most striking phonological difference is the Neapolitan weakening of unstressed vowels into schwa (schwa is pronounced like the a in about or the u in upon). However, it is also possible (and quite common for some Neapolitans) to speak Italian with a "Neapolitan accent"; that is, by pronouncing un-stressed vowels as schwa or by pronouncing the phoneme as (like the sh in ship) instead of (like the s in sea or the ss in pass) when is in initial position followed by a consonant, but not when it is followed by a dental occlusive or (at least in the purest form of the language) but by otherwise using the vocabulary and grammatical forms of Italian.
Therefore, while pronunciation presents the strongest barrier to comprehension, the grammar of Neapolitan is what sets it apart from Italian. In Neapolitan, for example, the gender and number of a word is expressed by a change in the accented vowel because it no longer distinguishes final unstressed , and (e.g. luongo , longa ; Italian , ; masc. "long", fem. "long"), whereas in Italian it is expressed by a change in the final vowel. These and other morpho-syntactic differences distinguish the Neapolitan language from the Italian language and the Neapolitan accent.
Neapolitan has had a significant influence on the intonation of Rioplatense Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires and the surrounding region of Argentina and in the entire country of Uruguay.Colantoni, Laura, and Jorge Gurlekian."Convergence and intonation: historical evidence from Buenos Aires Spanish", Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Volume 7, Issue 02, August 2004, pp. 107–119, Cambridge Journals Online
Vowels While there are only five graphic vowels in Neapolitan, phonemically, there are eight. Stressed vowels and can be either "closed" or "open" and the pronunciation is different for the two. The grave accent (, , ) is used to denote open vowels, and the acute accent (, , , ) is used to denote closed vowels, with alternative and . However, accent marks are not commonly used in the actual spelling of words except when they occur on the final syllable of a word, such as , , or , and when they appear here in other positions, it is only to demonstrate where the stress, or accent, falls in some words. Also, the circumflex is used to mark a long vowel where it would not normally occur (e.g. "you are"). + Vowels Front Central Back High High-mid Low-mid Low
Letter IPA ~
Consonants LabialDental/Alveolar Post-alveolarPalatal Velar Nasal () Plosive/Affricate () Fricative () ()Lateral Approximant Trill/Tap ~
Letter IPA p b t d c ~ g , f v s (in Italian) z j l m n r ~ q h x
Digraphs and trigraphs The following consonants are always geminated when they follow a vowel. Letter IPA gn gl(i) ~ sc
Grammar
Definite articles The Neapolitan classical definite articles (corresponding to the English word "the") are (feminine singular), (masculine singular) and (plural for both). They are traditionally spelled with the apostrophe to signify the elided sound .
Before a word beginning with a consonant: Singular Plural Masculine Feminine C: Neuter C: ∅ "C:" = the initial consonant of the following word is geminated if followed by a vowel.
These definite articles are always pronounced distinctly.
Before a word beginning with a vowel, or are used for both masculine and feminine, singular and plural. Although both forms can be found, the form is by far the most common.
In Neapolitan, the gender of a noun is not easily determined by the article, so other means must be used. In the case of , which can be either masculine singular or neuter singular (there is no neuter plural in Neapolitan), the initial consonant of the noun is doubled when it is neuter. For example, the name of a language in Neapolitan is always neuter, so if we see we know it refers to the Neapolitan language, whereas would refer to a Neapolitan man.
Likewise, since can be either masculine or feminine plural, when it is feminine plural, the initial consonant of the noun is doubled. For example, consider , which in Neapolitan is feminine singular, meaning "the list". In the plural, it becomes .
There can also be problems with nouns whose singular form ends in . Since plural nouns usually end in whether masculine or feminine, the masculine plural is often signaled orthographically, that is, by altering the spelling. As an example, consider the word , which means "boy" or (in the feminine form) "girl":
Singular Plural Masculine Feminine
More will be said about these orthographically changing nouns in the section on Neapolitan nouns.
A couple of notes about consonant doubling:
Doubling is a function of the article (and certain other words), and these same words may be seen in other contexts without the consonant doubled. More will be said about this in the section on consonant doubling. Doubling only occurs when a vowel follows the consonant. No doubling occurs if it is followed by another consonant, such as in the word spagnuolo (Spanish).
Indefinite articles The Neapolitan indefinite articles, corresponding to the English a or an, are presented in the following table:
Masculine Feminine Before words beginning with a consonant Before words beginning with a vowel
Verbal conjugation In Neapolitan there are four finite moods: indicative, subjunctive, conditional and imperative, and three non-finite modes: infinitive, gerund and participle. Each mood has an active and a passive form. The only auxiliary verbs used in the active form is (Eng. "to have", It. ), which contrasts with Italian, in which the intransitive and reflexive verbs take for their auxiliary. For example, we have:
Neapolitan
Italian
Doubled initial consonants In Neapolitan, many times the initial consonant of a word is doubled. This is called syntactic gemination (raddoppiamento sintattico in Italian). This linguistic phenomenon occurs also in Italian and in Finnish. All feminine plural nouns, preceded by the feminine plural definite article, , or any feminine plural adjective, have their initial consonant doubled.