A Romance language that evolved from Vulgar Latin (the vernacular of the people), Neapolitan has over six million speakers and has been influenced by Arabic, French, Greek and Spanish. Molisan, the language spoken by my parents, is considered a Napoletano dialect (named for the Kingdom of Naples, not the city).
Even within the region, subtle variations in speech patterns can occur between neighbouring villages. I learned this when my father’s cousin’s son said I spoke “like someone from Bonefro,” and I was in a township twelve kilometres away from our village. Before the advent of the internet, I referred to my mother tongue as Bonefran. In conversations with my folks, we frequently switched from English to Molisan to a mixture: Italish.
I tried to learn standard Italian at university. For a brief time, I sounded scholarly, but I felt pompous and pretentious, pushing out extended vowels felt like putting on airs. I didn’t realize the source of my frustration until later—an essential part of myself was splintering off when my mind began erasing words from the spoken language in favour of the written one: I couldn’t wander that far from my ancestors.