Dialects Reborn : Tongues Are Wagging All Over Europe

“Permovet animum conturbatque deminutum nuper linguae latinae studium, “ said Reginald Foster with lover’s zeal and scholar’s precision. He ain’t whistlin’ “Dixie.”

Foster is a Carmelite monk with a message. Decades after he left Milwaukee with well-thumbed grammars and a dream, Foster works in the Vatican, putting pronouncements of a Polish Pope into the ages-old official language of church business. Father Reginald Foster is the Apostle of Latin.

“The diminished study of the Latin language today is alarming,” he said again, in English this time, for Philistines.

Foster teaches Latin to student priests during the school year, and offers intensive summer courses to the intellectually curious. Last year’s students ranged in age from 18 to 92; many were young professors from big-time American universities repairing a classical gap in their learning.

Rallying to Their Roots

The Latin lover does not fight alone. From Edinburgh to Athens, little tongues are wagging. Across Western Europe today, the defenders of languishing languages and diminishing dialects are rallying to their roots. From Ireland to Sicily, a rear-guard fight to preserve and encourage minority tongues is gaining momentum.

Protagonists range from individual authorities such as Foster to governments; from universities and parents’ groups to the European Communities, which will spend more than $1 million this year to encourage 40 minor languages in its 12 member nations. An Occitan grammar for southern France, a Breton-Irish dictionary, a course for Spanish-speaking teachers of Galician, a conference with 34 monographs and more than 100 participants in Holland on the future of Frisian--these are all signs of fashionably polyglot times in Europe.

Sense of Heritage

“At least 50 million of the 320 million people in the Community countries speak a minor language,” said Donall O’Riagain, secretary general of the European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages in Dublin. “Many Europeans are discovering that local languages help reinforce their sense of heritage and identity.”

On the face of it, Europe’s sudden fancy with its linguistic past may seem paradoxical. Citizens are being encouraged to speak yesterday’s languages of limited scope and dazzling variety precisely when Western Europe is moving toward greater economic unification and political collaboration than at any time in its history.

In fact, the “little languages” boomlet springs from that same continental strength. Standard national languages are rock-solid, spoken nearly universally as a result of the prosperity and communications revolution that fueled the rebuilding of nations since World War II.

Once, minor languages represented an implicit threat to national cohesion in slow-to-coalesce countries such as Italy. Not long ago, to speak a regional language or a dialect was old-fashioned, as certain a brand of social and economic inferiority as peasant fingernails. No more.

Today, says O’Riagain, when universal education and universal television means that everyone speaks the standard variety of his national language, provincial accents and regional tongues are newly chic in some countries.

“At gatherings of the Roman social aristocracy, standard Italian increasingly gets left at the door. The Roman dialect once shunned by educated people is in,” said Rome journalist Umberto D’Arro, who speaks Italian at work, but with boyhood friends lapses happily into a Sicilian argot that survived the warning on a Mussolini-era classroom wall: “Dialect Is Not Spoken Here.”

Hundreds of Dialects

Said Lucien Jacoby, an official at the European Communities’ education department in Brussels: “Peoples who have been scared or coerced out of their mother tongues are now jumping back in. We count 40 minor languages, but there are also literally hundreds of dialects.”

Many of these are also making modest comebacks, thanks to grass-roots efforts at a regional level, sometimes aided by provincial universities and the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II will say Masses in Italian, German and the Tirolean dialect of Ladin later this summer on a visit to the province of Bolzano in northern Italy where all three languages are entrenched. German speakers are agitating for greater autonomy from Rome. Albanian and Greek-speaking priests work in southern Italian villages where those languages have been the lingua franca for centuries, because of 13th- and 14th-Century Christians fleeing the spreading empire of Islam from across the Ionian and Adriatic seas.

The Communities’ list of languages to foster ranges from Ladin, a neo-Latin spoken by about 30,000 mountain Italians, to Catalan, which has around 7 million speakers and is heard in parts of France and Italy, as well as in Spain, where it is an official language.

Common Market funds are also available to help promote languages such as Sard (Sardinia), Breton (France), Basque (France and Spain), West Frisian (Netherlands), Occitan (southern France and into bordering Spain and Italy), Friulian (northern Italy), Macedonian (Greece), North Frisian and Saterland (West Germany), and Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and almost-dead Cornish (Britain).

Native Tongues Revived

The European Parliament called in 1981 for countries to guarantee basic linguistic rights for indigenous minorities, but European governments have since reacted more as individuals than as a group. The French and Greek governments, at one extreme, view hanger-on languages with suspicion, for cultural and political reasons respectively. Ireland and Luxembourg, by contrast, have revived their native tongues in recent years and proclaimed them official national languages.

Although English may one day emerge as the language of a united Europe, Jacoby notes with a smile that the only tongue now spoken from birth by native minorities in all 12 Communities countries is Sinti-Roma, the language of the Gypsies. In officially bilingual Belgium, two monolingual societies in fact live side by side, speaking Walloon, a French dialect, and Flemish, a form of Dutch.

An abundance of languages can be unnerving to Americans who have trouble wrapping their tongue around oui, prego and gracias , but multilingualism is as comfortable as old shoes to many Europeans. Their compact continent is a linguistic wonderland.

Nine Working Languages

The European Communities have nine working languages, and bright young Eurocrats are expected to master four or five of them. Four languages--French, German, Italian and Romansch-- routinely fill the Swiss mountain air. Fractionalized Yugoslavia has 17 official languages. The priest-diplomats in the Vatican’s nunciatures (embassies) around the world are required to speak Italian, English, French and Spanish and to have at least a reading knowledge of Latin.

With booming Europe one of the world’s biggest traders, the virtues of fluency in languages, big and small, is as apparent to Europeans today as it was to French King Charles V six centuries ago. It was he who said he spoke Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to his soldiers and horses. A latter-day European prince, commercial or simply noble, might expand the list to speak English to his pilot and his computer, Portuguese to his dynasty’s imported Brazilian soccer stars and, with an eye to the future, Japanese to his bankers.

In the European linguistic flux, it is not always easy to say what is a language and what is only a dialect. Catalan, spoken by 7 million people, and Icelandic, spoken by a few hundred thousand, are languages. Sicilian, the at-home tongue of 5 million Italians, is a dialect. Valencian, say the Spaniards who live in Valencia, is a language. But the Catalans say it is only a dialect of their language.

Their Own Tradition

Some Italians insist that more than a dozen distinctive regional languages are spoken here. Many have their own grammar and literary tradition, but most Italians nevertheless dismiss them as dialects.

“As some American specialists have concluded, a language may simply be a dialect with a foreign ministry and an army,” said Tullio De Mauro, a University of Rome specialist in the diverse tongues of Italy.

The Communities consider Friulian, spoken in the Italian north, and Sard, spoken on the island of Sardinia, as languages. More than a dozen other regional tongues, large, small and often distinctive, are considered dialects, although one of them, Lucano, spoken by 600,000 people in the instep of the Italian boot, is further from Italian than Italian is from Romanian. It is closer to Greek.

By the same token, Occitan, the old troubadour language still spoken across southern France into Spain and Alpine Italy, is linguistically closer to Italian, Spanish and Portuguese than to French.

Frame of Reference

With Latin as a universal frame of reference (the Hungarian Parliament debated in Latin until World War I), major European languages all took giant strides toward their modern forms during the Renaissance. In the case of already centralized Spain, France, England--and, much later, Germany--the choice of a national vernacular was straightforward enough.

“All four adopted the language of a court-- the court,” notes New York University specialist Aldo Scaglione. “The Castilian of the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Isle de France French of frequenters of the court of Louis XIV, the ‘King’s English,’ as it is still referred to, of the court of London, and later the Hofsprache of the Dresden court of Upper Saxony, became the languages of their respective countries.”

Italy, until the mid-19th Century more a geographic expression than a country, had many courts, what De Mauro calls “a surfeit of capitals,” each speaking its own “national” language. At the Medici court in Florence, the language was Tuscan. Also, critically, Tuscan was the language of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. They are the principal reason that the language of the Medici princes and Popes is the language of modern Italy.

Closest to Latin

A good choice, thinks De Mauro: “Structurally, Tuscan was closest to Latin. Educated non-Italians in the Renaissance all spoke Latin and therefore found Tuscan transparent.”

If the Italian language existed before the Italian nation, it was slow to reach Everyman’s dinner table. Italian unification in the mid-19th Century was plotted in French, and the first king of a unified Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, was most at home in the French of his House of Savoy.

To this day in Italy, what is written in books and newspapers and spoken in schools and on television is not always what is heard among families and on the streets. The only bilingual public instruction in Italy is in northern border areas, where classes are given French, German and Slovene as well as Italian. Even so, the indigenous Italian dialects, passed mother to child, are proving surprisingly resilient.

A 1951-55 University of Rome study showed that only 36% of Italians could speak standard Italian, while 81% could speak a dialect, and 64% spoke one exclusively, at home and abroad in their communities.

Sicilian, Venetian, Neopolitan

By 1982, 77% could speak Italian, but 70% still spoke a dialect. According to De Mauro’s researches, in the booming Italy of the early 1980s, 23% of all Italians still spoke only a dialect. Another 47% flip effortlessly back and forth between their mother tongue and their school-learned national language: Italian at work but Sicilian, Venetian, Neopolitan, Calabrian or any one of a dozen others when feeling most at home.

“The best Italian is spoken today in areas where the local dialect is furthest from Italian,” said De Mauro, because it is classroom-taught, not casually adapted.

Article 6 of the Italian constitution safeguards linguistic minorities, but the Italian government is at no pains to promote minor languages. That effort comes from private groups, local governments and regional entrepreneurs like the Longo family publishing firm in Ravenna, which produces volumes of exquisite design in and about Italy’s minor tongues.

Not everybody, of course, thinks it is a good idea to reprieve from natural death what one Roman critic scornfully calls “baby talk.” Italian author Goffredo Parise, for one, finds no sympathy for “local dialects which are no more than an incomprehensible muttering, closer to the sounds of animals than to human expression.”

‘There Is No Conflict’

“Diversity of language does not cause strife or division,” O’Riagain rejoined. “It is, rather, the refusal of people to accept diversity that causes divisions. There is no conflict in speaking both a lesser-used language and a major international language. Why, there hasn’t been a West Frisian monoglot in two centuries, but 340,000 people in northern Holland speak it today.”

Neither are there many souls, even at the Vatican, who speak just Latin. But that is not Reginald Foster’s fault.

“When I go with friends for pizza in Trastevere, we speak Latin,” he said. “I speak Latin on trains, and on walking tours of Rome with my students. The other day a friend came in and we chatted about his prostate problems.

“Sometimes Italians will come up and say: ‘It’s nice to hear normal people speaking Latin.’ Normal people! It’s a living language. I have disciples all over the world. Attamen si thesaurorum humanitatis unus perierit maximus vera accidet clades. “

Like Father Foster, there are a growing number of Europeans today who also believe that it would be a real disaster if any one of civilization’s treasures were to perish.