The Milanese Dialect

A concise grammar

Andrea Tettamanzi

I paroll d'on lenguagg, car sur Gorell,
hin ona tavolozza de color,
che ponn fà el quader brutt e el ponn fà bell,
segond la maestrìa del pittor.

Senza idej, senza gust, senza on cervell
che regola i paroll in del descor,
tutt i lenguagg del mond hin come quell
che parla on sò umilissem servitor.

E sti idej, sto bon gust, già el savarà
che no han privativa di paês,
ma di coo che gh'han flemma de studià:

Tant l'è vera che, in bocca de usciurìa,
el bellissem lenguagg di Sienês
l'è el lenguagg pu cojon che mai ghe sia.

Carlo Porta, 1812

Note: This page contains tables, therefore it has to be read with an HTML browser that supports them.

This page is still under (slow) construction, and I apologize for any gaps and mistakes. This page was last updated on May 14, 2001.

Introduction

Milanese is spoken in Milan, Italy, and a big portion of its vicinities. It has been said that a language is a dialect with an army ⁽¹⁾. According to this view Milanese is considered by the layman a dialect of Italian. However, Milanese is to be classified as a Gallo-Romance language, therefore coordinate with French, Piedmontese, Ligurian, Rumantsch and Ladin ⁽²⁾.

Despite being a distant cousin, Italian has nevertheless exerted a strong influence on Milanese along the course of its history. Since the times of Renaissance, educated Milanese have always been conversant with standard Italian and they have been using it for learned and literary writing. However they would use Milanese in their everyday family life, for drawing-room conversations and, not surprisingly, to communicate with the common people.

In recent times, the fascist regime first, imposing the national language with the force and fighting against any minority language, and then the spread of Rome-based Italian state radio and television and massive immigration from other regions of Italy after the end of World War II have put Milanese in jeopardy.

Today, very few youngsters use it other than for short phrases in the middle of Italian sentences, and fewer and fewer of them even understand it, although in the countryside at least this is not always true.

Phonology

The Alphabet

Milanese is written using a latin alphabet of 22 letters, plus a few diacritic signs: Acute accent, grave accent and circumflex accent. The alphabet is the following:

a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, z.

Orthography

Vowels

There are nine distinct vowels. Four of them appear only in stressed syllables, and the remaining five can appear everywhere. The four "unstressed" vowels are the following:

a

The "open" a has the same sound as in the English word latin; the stress on this vowel is marked with an acute accent, except when it is at the end of a word, in which case it is marked with a grave accent;

e

The "closed" e has a sound similar to the diphthong ay in the English word say, except that it's short and strait; the stress on this vowel is marked with an acute accent;

i

Has the same sound as the letter e in the English word me; the stress on this vowel is marked with a grave accent;

o

The "closed" o has a sound similar to the diphthong ou in the English word you; the stress on this vowel is marked with a circumflex accent;

u

The u sounds like the German ü or the French u; the stress on this vowel is marked with a circumflex accent.

The four "stressed" vowels are the following:

à

It's difficult to find a sound corresponding to the "closed" a in other languages. Actually it appears that the difference with the "open" a is very hard to hear for nonnative Lombard speakers, and thus it is one of the features that help identify them; as a rough approximation, one could say that the "closed" a is much like an a articulated in the back of the mouth; a "closed" a at the end of a word is written as -aa instead of -à;

è

The "open" e has the same sound as the letter e in the English word bet;

ò

The "open" o has the same sound as the letter o in the English word top;

oeu

This sound is much like German ö or the diphthong eu in the French word peur.

Consonants

b

As in English.

c

This letter is used to write two different sounds: before a, o and u it gives the sound of the letter c in the English words cow, color and cool; before e and i and at the end of a word it gives the sound of letters ch in the English words chess and cheese; the group ch always gives the sound of the letter k in English.

d

As in English, at least as a first approximation. In fact, d is articulated with the tip of the tongue right on the back of the teeth.

f

As in English.

g

By itself, this letter is used to write two different sounds: like c, before a, o and u it gives the sound of the the letter g in the English words gum, got and good; before e and i and at the end of a word it gives the palatal sound of the letter j in the English word joy; the group gh always gives the sound of g in the English word guest; the group gn denotes a palatal nasal sound that cannot be found in English but is quite common in Romance languages, written as nh in Portuguese, ñ in Spanish and gn in French and Italian; finally, the group gu in front of a vowel is read as gw in the English name Gwen, while at the end of a word it is simply a graphical variant of gh for etymological reasons.

h

This letter does not have a sound by itself: it has a mere orthographic function. In combination with letters c and g it determines a velar sound.

j

Similar to y in English words you, toy.

l

As in English.

m

As in English.

n

As in English. When simple at the end of a word, it marks nasalization of the preciding vowel.

p

As in English.

q

This letter always appears followed by u and a vowel and the group qu is always read as in English quick. In a few cases group qu is found at the end of a word, and then it is simply a graphical variant of ch for etymological reasons and is written by some without the u.

r

Lightly rolled, as in Italian or Scottish.

s

As in English, this letter can be voiced or unvoiced: it is voiced, like s in the English word was when it is between vowels or in front of a voiced consonant; it is unvoiced at the end of a word, at the beginning of a word and in front of an unvoiced consonant. Double s is always unvoiced. The groups sc and sg in front of vowels e and i and at the end of a word denote a palatal fricative, respectively unvoiced and voiced: sc is read like sh in the English words shelter, sheet and wash; sg is read like j in the French word jeter. When s and c or g are not to be grouped, they are separated by an apostrophe, yielding s'c and s'g.

t

As in English, at least as a first approximation. In fact, t is articulated with the tip of the tongue right on the back of the teeth.

v

In most cases v is pronounced as in English. A remarkable exception is that when occurring between vowels v tends to disappear, all the more so if one of the vowels is o or u, in which case it can be regarded as an orthographical device to keep two adjacent vowels from forming a diphthong.

z

In modern Milanese, z tends to merge with s, but it obeys slightly different rules of pronunciations: unlike s, it can be voiced even in word-initial position and when double; it is always unvoiced at the end of a word. There is no general rule to tell when z is voiced or unvoiced.

Phonetic Rules

The voice of consonants is neutralized in final position, i.e., the normal contrast between voiced and unvoiced consonants disappears at the end of words. In phonetic terms, what happens is that voiced consonants in word-final position are pronounced as if they were unvoiced. This is a trait Milanese shares with other Gallo-Romance languages, like Catalan and Occitanic, and a number of other central and eastern European languages, like German and Russian.

In contemporary Milanese, unstressed e in a word-final syllable closed by m or n tends to be pronounced as if it were o. For example: se vedem, "see you" (literally "we see eachother") is nowadays pronounced as if it were se vedom; archaic periquel, "danger", is now pronounced (and therefore also written) pericol. The same phenomenon has gone even further in the variants spoken towards Como, where this transformation is applied consistently, thus yielding the masculine singular definite article ol instead of el, "the".

Morphology

Milanese has two genders, masculine and feminine, and two numbers, singular and plural. The categories of words that are inflected according to gender are: article, noun, pronoun and adjective.

Article

There are two articles in Milanese: definite article and indeterminate article.

Definite article

The indeterminate article uses two roots for singular and plural. The root used for singular forms is on-, akin to the numeral vun, "one", whereas the plural form is in fact the articulate preposition di which introduces a partitive complement:

The Noun

Gender of nouns

Feminine nouns are usually marked by the -a ending in the singular form, with the exception of all feminine abstract nouns formed with the suffix -zion. There is no morphological distinction between masculine and feminine in the plural.

In general, nouns are classified according to gender in the same way as they are in Italian.

Nouns whose gender classification diverges from Italian are the following: el martor, "the marten"; el verz, "the savoy"; la pàssera, "the sparrow"; el foìn, "the beech-marten"; la gira, "the loir"; la saa, "the salt"; la spuzza, "the stink"; la midôlla, "the marrow"; la spua, "the spit"; l'assa, "the beam"; la bugada, "the laundry"; el bombàs, "the cotton wool"; la bazzila, "the basin"; l'éco, "the echo"; la guaja, "the woe"; el sciavàtt, "the slipper"; la fanga, "the mud"; la zòccora, "the clog", "the hoof"; la rama, "the (secondary) branch" (the main branch is masculine: el ramm); la gnaccia, "a chestnut cake"; el canef/canov, "the hemp", "the cannabis"; el pures, "the flea"; el scimes, "the bug"; la purisna, "the itch"; el capnégher, "the blackcap"; el tremacôa, "the wagtail"; el salìn, "the salt pot"; el popoeu, "the pupil (of an eye)"; el sciabel/sciabol, "the sabre"; Milán, "Milan"; Parìs, "Paris"; el Cairo, "Cairo".

The following nouns have alternate masculine and feminine classification (forms are listed according to how common they are, most common first): la badila/el badil, "the shovel"; el/la sògn, "the dream"; el/la lumm, "the lamp"; l'ari/l'aria, "the air"; l'èstes/l'èstasi, "the extasy"; la s'giaffa/el s'giaff, "the slap"; la schinca/el stinch, "the shin"; el poián/la poianna, "the buzzard"; el parpaj/la parpàja, "the butterfly".

Plural formation

As a general rule, masculine nouns have the same form for both singular and plural. However, there are a few notable exceptions to this rule:

• masculine nouns formed with the diminutive suffix -in change it into -itt in the plural, for example sg. el borin, "the nipple", pl. i boritt, "the nipples";
• sg. el pé, "the foot", pl. i pee, "the feet";

Feminine nouns ending in -a form their plural by simply dropping that ending, for example sg. la donna, "the woman", pl. i donn, "the women"; sg. l'ideja, "the idea", pl. i idej, "the ideas".

Feminine nouns not ending in -a have the same form for both singular and plural.

Pronoun

Some tenses are formed from the past participle forms with the help of the two auxiliaries vess, "to be" and avé, "to have". It is therefore useful to examine these two verbs to begin with.

In particular,

• past pluperfect is formed with the past imperfect of the auxiliary + past participle;
• past perfect is formed with the present of the auxiliary + past participle;
• future perfect is formed with the future of the auxiliary + past participle.

Note: The alternate third person singular form ell is only used in isolation, that is when the verb is not preceded by the prefix pronoun. In contemporary Milanese this seldom happens, with a few notable exceptions in idiomatic expressions, such as t'ell chì, "here it is" or in questions, e.g. chi ell che no ha de dì che ..., literally "who is the one who doesn't have to say that ..., ell fors che no ghe piasen sti reson? "Is it maybe that you don't like these reasons?". In fact, ell is the fossilized contraction of a form è-el, "is it", which shows inversion of verb and prefix subject pronoun.

Future:

1. This saying is attributed to Max Weinreich by Noam Chomsky in his Knowledge of Language, p. 15, supported by The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, edited by John Gross, Oxford Press, 1983, which lists the aphorism A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy on p. 282 and attributes it to Max Weinrich. Other sources attribute it to Edward Sapir, Bill Welmers, Roman Jakobson (cited by Paul Kiparsky) and Otto Jespersen.
2. This genetic affiliation of Milanese is authoritatively supported by the Ethnologue database of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which, in addition, remarks that

   [Lombard is a] group of dialects, some of which may be separate languages. Very different from Standard Italian. Speakers may all be adequately bilingual in Standard Italian.