The Marino dialectRecognising the arbitrariness of definitions, the term ‘language’ is used in the nomenclature of entries according to ISO 639-1, 639-2 or 639-3. In other cases, the term ‘dialect’ is used. is a dialect belonging to the dialects of the Roman Castles in the linguistic family of Central Italian and, specifically, the Central-Northern Latian dialect. It is spoken within the metropolitan city of Rome in the city of Marino and its territory in the Alban Hills.
Marino is located south of the "Ancona-Rome Line," an ideal dividing line drawn by glottologists to divide the northern Etruscan and Tuscan area of influence from the southern area, which remained tied to Sabine and Latin influence.Ugo Vignuzzi, I dialetti del Lazio, in Touring Club Italiano, Guide rosse - Lazio, pp. 83-84. Despite its long oral tradition, Marinese seems to be losing ground in favour of the Roman dialect, reduced more to "parlance" and the use of characteristic expressions, a phenomenon similar to all the Castellan dialects and those of centers in the southern quadrant of the metropolitan city of Rome and the Lazio coast.Ugo Vignuzzi, I dialetti del Lazio, in Touring Club Italiano, Guide rosse - Lazio, p. 89.
The Marino dialect does not have legal recognition (Law No. 482 of 15 December 1999) nor is it regulated by a regulating body, but it was studied for the first time by the Marinese historian Girolamo Torquati in 1886, at the same time that a dictionary of the most frequently used words in the dialect was compiled.
History
The first mention of the existence of the castle of Marino would date back to 1090,. or at the latest to 1114: the fief had most likely belonged to the Counts of Tusculum,. and then with their decline had come into the possession of the Frangipane:. with the extinction of the latter, the castle was purchased in 1266 by Cardinal Matteo Rubeo Orsini and came into the orbit of the Orsini,. in whose possession Marino remained until 1379. In that year, due to the Western Schism, a period of feudal anarchy began, which lasted until the election of Pope Martin V in 1417: in the same year, the pope's brother Giordano Colonna bought the castle of Marino, initiating the long period of Colonna rule.
Marino's importance throughout the Middle Ages was linked to its strong position close to the Ager Romanus, which made it a coveted first-class outpost on Rome. However, with the glory also came peril: the castle was besieged in 1267. and 1347,. conquered in 1379,. in 1385,. in 1399, in 1405 (twice), in 1408 and 1413 (twice), in 1482, razed to the ground in 1501,.. sacked in 1526.. and 1599.. It was only at the end of this long period of local wars that ravaged Lazio that the Colonna family was able to devote itself to governing the fiefdom, carrying out during the seventeenth century important urban works and public works such as the Colonna palace,Vittorio Rufo, L'abitato storico - Palazzo Colonna, in AA.VV., Marino - Immagini di una città, p. 127.Mara Montagnani, Il Palazzo Colonna di Marino, in Castelli Romani anno XL n° 2, p. 41. the basilica of San Barnaba,. the fountain of the Four Moors,. and Corso Trieste.Mara Montagnani, Il Palazzo Colonna di Marino, in Castelli Romani anno XL n° 2, p. 46. In 1606 Pope Paul V elevated the fief to a duchy. By the early eighteenth century Marino had about 4,000 inhabitants, and was thus one of the most populous and wealthiest centers in the Alban Hills.
Immigration to Marino was fostered as early as the sixteenth century: Marcantonio II Colonna, the papal admiral who won the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, issued a decree on 26 December 1574, exempting any foreigner who wished to settle in his fief of Marino from paying any kind of tax for four years, provided that he swore an oath of allegiance. In 1656, the terrible plague epidemic that struck Rome and central-southern Italy decimated the population of Marino to such an extent that only seventeen families were left in the fiefdom:Il Marinese, anno II n° 37 (12 dicembre 1954), p. 10. Duke Cardinal Girolamo Colonna incentivized repopulation by encouraging immigration from less economically vibrant areas of his domains, such as the Marsica fiefdom of Tagliacozzo or some of the Campagna and Marittima fiefdoms. An immigration from these areas and from other parts of Abruzzo and the eastern quadrant of the present province of Rome continued throughout the eighteenth century, but still in the early twentieth century there existed throughout the Roman Castles a seasonal immigration of peasant laborers employed for work in the vineyards, for a long time poorly paid and excluded from the conquests progressively obtained by local laborers.. Many of these seasonal migrants settled permanently in Marino and the other Castellan centers, especially after the Second World War: this phenomenon, together with the increasingly disproportionate growth of Rome, the attraction of the Urbe or the factories of the Pontine Marshes, have determined a frenetic development that has occurred in the last thirty years of new urban expansions in the historic centers and the birth of new centers.
Marino has had to deal with the birth of Ciampino, the "garden city" founded in 1919 for veterans of World War I. and made autonomous from the municipality in 1974, and with the birth of the hamlets of Santa Maria delle Mole, Frattocchie, and Due Santi, whose autonomy drive was curbed by the constitutional court in 1995 after the experience of the autonomous municipality of Boville. The origin of the "new Marinese" is varied: people from Veneto, Romagna, Abruzzo, Naples, Sardinia, Basso Lazio, Apulia and Calabria, and Sicily, alongside Romans who fled the metropolis. Since the mid-1990s, the flow of foreign immigrants began: in 2007 there were 2331 foreign citizens living in Marino, with the largest Albanian community in the Roman Castles (300 people) and over 600 Romanians.
Origins and development The Marino dialect was formed along with the castle and its growing population: the most intense wave of immigration that might have affected the dialect the most was the one following the plague of 1656.
There are no written records in the Marinese dialect prior to the twentieth century: however, the first scholar to deal with the Marinese dialect was the historian Girolamo Torquati in his publication "Origine della lingua italiana: dall'attuale dialetto del volgo laziale al dialetto del popolo romano nel secolo XIII e da quest'ultimo dialetto a quello della plebe latina nell'età della Repubblica e dell'Impero. Investigazioni filologiche del cavalier Girolamo Torquati," a four-hundred-page work printed in Rome in 1886.. The purpose of the book, which was written, according to the author, "as a relief from more serious studies," is to demonstrate that "the apparently strange diction of the Marinese dialect is indigenous, and urban, and has no flavor of foreignness,". and consequently "that the Marinese dialect, which was already the Roman dialect of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, is formally the vernacular language of the ancient Romans." Torquati demonstrates this by first providing an extensive explanation of the strangest morphological, phonological and grammatical forms of the Marinese dialect (Chapter I), then expounding a dictionary of particular Marinese words by juxtaposing them with the corresponding Italian words (Chapter II), then comparing these to the words used in the "Chronicle" of the Roman Anonymous, thus to the Roman dialect of the early fourteenth century: and from there he arrives at the conclusion as to what the original Latin language was like.
Literature As far as the work in Marino dialect is concerned, it consists mainly of plays, written beginning with the opening after World War I of Marino's first theater, the "Auditorium Monsignor Guglielmo Grassi" (so named in 1954, after the death of the abbot-parish priest who ordered its opening, Guglielmo Grassi) located in the premises of the former Coroncina Oratory under the basilica of St. Barnabas. Among the most prominent writers in the Marino dialect are Roberto Di Sante, with some very successful musical comedies such as "E tira a campà" (written with Mario Galbani in 1982), "Cariolacciu", "Bonu 'spidale" and "C'era 'na vorta a guera", Peppe De Filippis ("Incontru de do' compari"), Castro Meneri ("In Pretura") and Remo ("U viaggiu de i do' combari"). On the occasion of the Marino Wine Festival there are also exhibitions in the Marino dialect.
Lexicon Most of the characteristic words of the Marinese dialect come directly from the Latin language, a fact that led Girolamo Torquati to argue for a continuity between the "language of the ancient Romans" and the Marinese dialect..
Phonetics Replacement of the "l" by the "r"
In the Marino dialect, it is worth noting a phenomenon that is also very characteristic of the Roman dialect, namely the substitution of the consonant "l" for the consonant "r" in pronunciation, so that instead of the standard Italian forms "splendente", "coltello", "plebe" and "moltiplicare", one says "sprendente", "cortello", "prebe", "mortipricare".. This phenomenon is very old and contradicts the practice of some writers, such as the Sienese novelist Pietro Fortini, of substituting the "r" for the "l". This substitution also occurs in proper nouns: "Gloria" becomes "Groria", "Clemente" becomes "Cremente", and so on.
Dropping the "l" in the middle of words
Another Marinese phenomenon is the dropping of the "l" in the middle of a word when it is followed by "z," "s," "i," or "c": so that there will be the dialectal pronunciation "cazone" (instead of "calzone"), "cazetta" (instead of "calzetta"), "coto" (instead of "colto"), "atro" (instead of "altro").. On the other hand, this usage already appears in the "Chronicle" of the Roman Anonymous dating from the early fourteenth century: in this case, however, the "l" is replaced by an often silent "i" (e.g., "voize," "toize," "aitro"). In addition, a different outcome of the dropping of the "l" may be the substitution with the "vi" group, and in Marinese one has "cavicio" ("calcio"), "sevice" ("selce"), "scavizo" ("scalzo").
Assimilation of the consonantal group "nd"
In the presence of the consonantal group "nd" ("bando," "ghirlanna," "risponde") the Marinese, but also the Romans and a large part of the Castellan population, underwent an unconscious process of assimilation from "nd" to "nn": hence one would have "banno," "ghirlanna," "risponne," a fact already attested in the aforementioned "Chronicle" of the Roman Anonymous..
Morphology and syntax
Adjectives and nouns Ending in "-u"
The most important phenomenon in the formation of nouns and adjectives in the Marinese dialect is the presence of the termination "-u" instead of "-o," a phenomenon equally present in other dialects of the Roman Castles, such as in Rocca di Papa and Genzano di Roma. This is a phenomenon typical of the southern parts of Lazio, of the "Sabine" area south of the aforementioned "Rome-Ancona" demarcation line.
Girolamo Torquati asserts. that the termination in "-u" by truncation of the "s" and "m" ending already existed in the Latin language, bringing numerous examples, from Marcus Fabius Quintilianus ("serenu' fuit et dignu' loco") to Marcus Tullius Cicero ("egregie cordatus homo Catus Eliu' Sextus").Cicero, De oratore, XIV. Hence he goes on to infer that the Roman people nipped the final consonant "s" or "m" and from this they obtained most of the vernacular and later Italian words ("focus" > "focu" > "fuoco," "vinum" > "vinu" > "vino"): the Marinese dialect would thus preserve the words without the transformation of "u" into "o" that occurred in the early centuries of Italian literature.
Mutation of the "i" to an "e"