Dialetti moderni e volgari antichi: appunti sulle dinamiche linguistiche dell’Italia centro-meridionale

The author discusses three problems concerning the linguistic relationships between modern dialects and ancient volgari in the Western sector of Southern Italy (along the Tyrrhenian coast). In the first part, he draws the attention towards two cases of “isoglosses’ movement”: in the Croniche by Gasparro Fuscolillo, from Sessa Aurunca (Caserta, 16th century), and in the fragments of Agnello da Gaeta (in the modern Southern Latium, 13th century) the language seems very similar to the volgare that we find in the texts from “Italia mediana” (Umbria, Marche, Northern Latium etc.), but the linguistic maps of the Atlante Linguistico Italiano show that these same linguistic conditions are till today also in the modern dialects of the rural villages near Sessa Aurunca and in Minturno, near Gaeta; so, the hypothesis of a linguistic change (“isoglosses’ movement”) is probably not true. In the second part the author analyzes the traces of the vocalic centralization (the development of the sound schwa, -ə) in three texts coming from the coast of Campania and written during the 13th and 14th centuries (scritta di Amalfi, 1288, Epistola napoletana del Boccaccio, 1339, Inventari di Fondi, end of the 14th century), where the phenomenon is already recognizable in different ways, while the third question is the ancient linguistic position of Montecassino: the language of the Ritmo cassinese (13th century) is in fact quite different from the modern dialect; nevertheless, this kind of language could be not the faithful mirror of the oral varieties of the Middle Ages, but the product of a particular scripta, developed in the multilingual context of the Abbey.