Rome stays Neapolitan

As shown by several medieval manuscripts, the medieval Roman dialect was more similar to southern dialect, such as those spoken in Naples. In the 16th century, it received a strong influence of the Tuscan dialect (from which modern Italian derives) after the immigration of people from that region in the wake of the Sack of Rome (1527). Therefore current Romanesco has grammar and roots rather different from other dialects in the Latium region; further, usually Romanesco is fully understandable for other Italian speakers.

What are the consequences if Rome stayed Neapolitan rather than changing or switching languages.
 
Hmm. Would the Romans feel closer to the Neapolitans ATL? Could this lessen intra-Italian prejudice after reunification, making Roman politicians and people feel less compatriots of their northern brothers and more of their much-maligned Southern ones? I don't know how strong the aversion already was in the 1870s - I suppose not that strong yet - but could this lead to a decision not to move the capital to Rome?
 
Hmm. Would the Romans feel closer to the Neapolitans ATL? Could this lessen intra-Italian prejudice after reunification, making Roman politicians and people feel less compatriots of their northern brothers and more of their much-maligned Southern ones? I don't know how strong the aversion already was in the 1870s - I suppose not that strong yet - but could this lead to a decision not to move the capital to Rome?

The only thing I could imagine is that with Rome more "southern" - which is not guaranteed deriving from linguistic arguments only - and hence an important additional cultural centre for the South, emergence of a more pronounced Southern identity may be more likely than IOTL - yet still quite unlikely nevertheless.
 
I remember a discussion about that in an Italian mailing list of AH. My guess is: the italianization of the Romanesco would be just delayed.
Rome will be the capital regardless, and so will attract a lot immigrants from everywhere (particularly from the South and the Northeast as per OTL) making standard italian the dominant language in the city after, more or less, WWI or WWII. More or less a path similar to Milan, where the local vernacular (unintelligible to an Italian native speaker like me) almost disappeared.
The point is that Romanesco literature will be far different from OTL, and NOT intelligible to the northeners, just as the Milanese and Neapolitan are not to average Italians. Maybe i'll post more on this later.
 
The only thing I could imagine is that with Rome more "southern" - which is not guaranteed deriving from linguistic arguments only - and hence an important additional cultural centre for the South, emergence of a more pronounced Southern identity may be more likely than IOTL - yet still quite unlikely nevertheless.

Southern Marche speaks Southern Italian or Neapolitan as I remember..

I was thinking would the Kings of Sicily be later interested in getting Lazio if Romanesco stayed close to the dialect of Naples and would that stop or delay italian reunification?..
 

Arrix85

Donor
I don't think the a Rome more "southern" would change anything. In OTL the region around Rome and the dialect spoken inside of it weren't tuscanized, so there's a difference between the dialect of the city and the region surrounding it. The Pope anyway would still be there, what difference does it make if the city and Latium have the same dialect? The influence of Roman dialect on the Italian language would be next to nothing, as in OTL, Italian would be the Florence dialect cleaned of the too local elements.
 
Only the extreme southern part of Marche speaks a dialect more closely related to the South than to rest of Marche. You can call it "Neapolitan" because Neapolitan is the variety who developed a significant literary standard among those group of vernaculars, but still the spoken language of the southernmost Marche is hardly mutually intelligible with the one spoken in Naples. I know it, since I come from Southern Marche :D (not the part speaking Southern dialects though).
Those dialectal areas, however, never played an important role in shaping politics or identity, except maybe in very recent times. No historical Italian polity, with the very partial exceptions of Venice and maybe Genua, ever claimed an area on the basis of the dilectal families. The elites just did not care much of the dialects. When a city was locally prominent for whatever reason, its dialect could have a literary status, so that Italy is plenty of interesting vernacular literatures. Some of them (such as Neapolitan, Romanesco, Milanese and Venetian) have a national prestige, and most Italian dialects, even of restricted ares have established written standards. But dialect FAMILIES, as opposed to local individual dialects, never mattered much to my knoledge.
"Neapolitan" in the sense of the family of Italian southern dialects grouped together is a construction of modern linguistics with little relevance to average people self-perception. I hardly see any political consequence of the dialect spoken in Rome being closer to Naples than to other dialects of Central Italy. As I said, it would affect the literary history and the Italian language to the extent Romanesco idioms leaked into it. The Giocchino Belli analog would probably be less understood throughout Italy and the current standard might be a little more resembling the Southern accents and richer in Southern idioms. This might, in a very minor way, favor the estrangement of some Northeners towards the capital and the South, but I don' t see any major impact.
 
I was thinking that a divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine and a Neapolitan speaking Rome that survives to the present would be the result if Rome was not sacked.
 
I remember a discussion about that in an Italian mailing list of AH. My guess is: the italianization of the Romanesco would be just delayed.
Rome will be the capital regardless, and so will attract a lot immigrants from everywhere (particularly from the South and the Northeast as per OTL) making standard italian the dominant language in the city after, more or less, WWI or WWII. More or less a path similar to Milan, where the local vernacular (unintelligible to an Italian native speaker like me) almost disappeared.
The point is that Romanesco literature will be far different from OTL, and NOT intelligible to the northeners, just as the Milanese and Neapolitan are not to average Italians. Maybe i'll post more on this later.
When did Tuscan become "standard Italian" as it were? It didn't happen the instant Dante emerged and Rome was the center of the Italian Renaissance under Borgia and later Popes.
 
When did Tuscan become "standard Italian" as it were? It didn't happen the instant Dante emerged and Rome was the center of the Italian Renaissance under Borgia and later Popes.

In effect, not until the 1870s. Several patriotic authors from Lombardy and Piedmont rewrote their works in Tuscan for republication in the new, official standard after 1872. But tusan Italian - the language of Dante and Boccaccio - enjoyed greater prestige long before. Many patriotic intellectuals went with the assumption that once Italy was unified, it would speak Tuscan, the "highest" form of Italian.
 
My dad would have an easier time watching Inspector Montalbano?
:p

Damn. No; that’s Sicilian.

Some of the people from Lazio and Abruzzi gone to Sicily and Calabria to repopulate Sicily and the Calabria area Italicizing the greeks who used to live there.
 
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