Tergestino is an the Romance dialect spoken in Trieste until the nineteenth century, when it became extinct in favour of the Triestine dialect of Venetian. was a Rhaeto-Romance language, similar to Friulian, in particular to the varieties of , and even more so to the nearby Muglisano dialect. Tergestino, reduced to the language of a closed aristocracy, became extinct before Muglisan, which did not have this rigid class specialisation.
History Tergentino was spoken in Trieste by the majority of the population until the end of the eighteenth century. From that period onwards, a rapid process of linguistic substitution began which led to the disappearance of Tergentino and the prevalence of , the Triestine dialect. The substitution occurred when Trieste, Habsburg since 1382, became an important commercial port (starting in 1719) and its population rapidly increased from around 6,000 inhabitants to more than 200,000. This demographic increase, due to massive immigration from areas with a different language, overturned the linguistic fabric of Trieste and led to the disappearance of Tergentino. It survived until the first half of the nineteenth century as the language of the oldest aristocratic families of the city (called lis tredis ciasadisI nomi delle tredici casate sono: Argento, Baseggio, Belli, Bonomo, Burlo, Cigotti, Giuliani, Leo, Padovino, Pellegrini, Pettazzi, Stella, Toffani).
Moving along the lines of a tradition inaugurated by Pier Gabriele Goidanich and taken up more recently by Mario Doria, two phases can be identified in the history of Tergestino: an older one that goes from 1300, the period to which the first attestations date back, up to the first half of the eighteenth century, and a "modern" one that ends in the first half of the nineteenth century with its extinction.
Ancient phase Of the first phase we have only indirect and sporadic evidence consisting of passages found in documents from the Trieste archives, "relics" collected by Jacopo Cavalli and Graziadio Isaia Ascoli in some writings from the late 19th century and more recently by Pavle Merkù. These are short phrases, anthroponyms and toponyms within documents written in Latin or, in some cases, in a Venetian-style vernacular.
To these documentary fragments are added indirect testimonies such as the one dating back to 1542 and contained in a letter sent from Nice by the Capodistrian Gerolamo Muzio to Pier Paolo Vergerio, bishop of Capodistria: "This city has its own language, which is neither Italian, nor French, nor Provençal as Muggia and Trieste have in our countries" , or again the note added by Giacomo Filippo Tommasini, bishop of Cittanova who died in 1654, in his commentaries: "The language of these inhabitants (of Trieste) is corrupted Forlan; and there are many who use the Slavic language, and German but they are not natural here".
Modern phase The second phase begins with the period in which the city, following the granting of the prerogative of free port by the Austrian Emperor Charles VI in 1719, experienced a period of rapid demographic expansion and a parallel restriction of the diffusion of the Tergestino dialect, which ended up being confined to a small group of people belonging mostly to the old Trieste patriciate who jealously guarded it.
We could therefore somehow speak of a phase characterised initially by the resistance of the original dialect (until the end of the 18th century) and then by a rapid decline (first decades of the 19th century).
The only written texts available to us belong to this period:
The Sonet del ver Triestin, dating back to 1796.Memoria per i nuestri posterior della consacrazion fatta nella Glesia de Sam Zust martir del nov Vesco… nel am 1796 The Racont, a composition in verse also dating back to 1796, which describes the same event narrated by the Sonet.Della funzion fatta nella Glesia Cattedral de San Zust Martir al 23 d'ottober dell'am 1796 quant ch'an consacra vesco de Triest el Lustrissem e Reverendissem Monsignor Ignazi Gaetam de Buset in Fraistemberg &cc. The Dialoghi piacevoli in dialetto vernacolo triestino, composed by Giuseppe Mainati in 1828. The Tergestino version of the parable of the Prodigal Son (Parabula del fi prodigh) by Mainati himself dates back to a period between 1835 and the author's death in 1842.
To these texts we can add several indirect testimonies, which cover a rather long period and, starting from the mid-18th century, arrive up to the threshold of the scientific systematization inaugurated by Ascoli.
In the report attached to the Consul Hamilton's report to Maria Theresa of 25 July 1761, Tomaso Ustia states that in Trieste "there are inhabitants of three different languages, namely Italian, Triestino and Slavic: whoever does not know that the particular Triestino language, used particularly by the Plebs, gives any good Italian in many words necessary to be understood will not be understood, and that the majority of the Plebs themselves do not know how to express themselves in Italian..." , thus confirming the eighteenth-century vitality of the Triestino language.
In a note to a sonnet written in Italian by Pietro Bachiocco in 1797, the phrase appears: "The vernacular dialect of Trieste and Muggia are very similar".
Antonio Cratey in the “Perigrafia di Trieste”, published in 1808, writes: “it will be said that Trieste borders on Friuli and was a Venetian state, and that therefore its dialect, although used by few nowadays, is a mix of Friulian and Venetian.” . The author also records in the toponymy of the city forms from Trieste such as Baudariu, Chiadino, Chiarbola, Ciauchiara, Pondares.
In the note on Italian dialects added by Francesco Cherubini to the translation of the Prospetto nominativo di tutte le lingue note e dei loro dialetti by Federico Adelung, published in 1824, we read “Even in the Trieste area (Illyria) an Italian dialect is spoken that resembles Friulian”.
Again in 1824, Girolamo Agapito in his "Complete and extensive description of the most faithful city and free port of Trieste" describes the dialect of Trieste as "an Italian dialect which originally had many of its own properties and was somewhat distant from the Venetian dialect to which, however, it gradually came closer, so that, at present, it can be said that it is the same Venetian vernacular".
On 22 June 1845, the magazine Il Caleidoscopio published a sonnet dating back to 1796 (Il sonet del ver Triestin which was mentioned above). The editor of the newspaper, Adalberto Thiergen (hidden under the pseudonym of Tito Delaberrenga), noted: "The ancient Triestine dialect, now almost lost in written texts, and adulterated in common speech, was composed largely of Venetian, with some phrases or endings from neighbouring Friuli and Istria".
Pietro Kandler's position deserves particular attention, both for the authoritativeness of the character and for the evolution of his opinion on the Friulian dialect over time. Kandler in fact starts from a very sceptical vision: in the March 28, 1846 issue of the newspaper L'Istria we read “The belief took hold that the dialect already spoken in Trieste was Friulian, and in support of this was cited the custom of some noble family, some occasional writings, the not new opinion that Trieste physically belonged to Friuli. The use of the Friulian dialect was never by the common people, nor by the generality, but by single individuals”. A somewhat more nuanced position is found in Istria, in the issue of 16 May of the same year: dealing with the dialect of Muggia, Kandler writes “The dialect that was spoken there and that is still spoken there by many, differed in some ways from Venetian; some say that the dialect of Muggia is the same one that was spoken in Trieste in times past; an opinion that needs better verification than that which can be given today in the language spoken by the people”. This point of view will change significantly in the following decades. In a handwritten note on his personal copy of the first edition of the "History of the Council of Patricians of Trieste" and therefore datable between 1858 (date of publication) and 1872 (date of Kandler's death), transcribing a satirical poem dating back to 1689, Kandler notes "In this poem we have a sample of the Ferrarese dialect, which Quinto spoke, and of the vulgar Triestine dialect put into the mouth of a patrician who put the fields, whose cultivation he directed, before public cares." , and a few lines below "To sing a patrician because he spoke plebeian jargon, points out what was known to us through other means, that is, that two dialects were spoken in Trieste: the plebeian which must be common in Muggia according to what we have heard; and the noble, which was Venetian raised to the dignity of a spoken language, but not of a written language".
In 1859 Jacopo Pirona, in his Attenenze della lingua friulana date per chiosa ad una iscrizione del MCIII wrote: It will seem strange to the majority of the inhabitants of Trieste to find themselves included under an ethnographic aspect in the region of Friuli. It is however certain that as far as we can remember in the original Triestine families Friulian was spoken; and whoever does not believe this should see the book by the Triestine Mainati "Dialogues pleasant in dialetto vernacolo triestino", Trieste 1828. The original inhabitants however are now few and the non-original inhabitants, using the common Italian language, do not even realise that they are in Friulian land.
In 1867 Michele Leicht, in the "Terza centuria di canti popolari friulani", published the entire fourth dialogue of Mainati.
The last Tergestini In 1893 Abbot Jacopo Cavalli published the results of a survey conducted among the elderly inhabitants of old Trieste in the previous three years, from which a picture emerged that confirmed what Mainati had stated in his introduction to the Dialogues. The people interviewed recalled that in the first decades of the 19th century, Tergentino was still spoken in some families belonging to the environment of lis tredis ciasadis and from their declarations, supported by authoritative witnesses such as Attilio Hortis, memories of the ancient dialect and some phrases heard in youth emerge.
It also emerges that, surprisingly, Tergestino still survived in the second half of the 19th century, at a time when even Ascoli thought it was extinct: the last speaker, Giuseppe de Jurco, who had used it fluently in his family until 1833 and had passed it on to his children, died in 1889. Also emblematic is the case of Stefano de Conti (known as Sciefin), mayor of Trieste from 1861 to 1863 and who died in 1872, who spoke it regularly with his brother Giusto (who died in 1876) and with the elderly Triestini. According to one of the testimonies collected by Cavalli, he had used it with his Friulian interlocutors during a visit to Cormons as mayor of Trieste, causing amazement among those present.
To these testimonies we can add a letter sent from Rome on 18 December 1893 to Jacopo Cavalli by the archaeologist Dante Vaglieri (1865-1913), in which we read "I can also say that in our families, among all the relatives, the Mainati was owned and it never occurred to anyone to call him - for his work on the dialect - a forger. We also owned a copy, which later disappeared, and it was one of my readings in my childhood".
In reality, the last traces of Tergestino could be even more recent: in 2008 the linguist Pavle Merkù reported having discovered that a single peasant family on the outskirts of the city continued to use the ancient dialect until the eve of the World War I.. Furthermore, according to Merkù, at the end of the nineteenth century there would have been, in addition to those registered by Cavalli, other people in the city who continued to use the ancient dialect, including Baroness Economo.
Studies on Tergestino