Tuscan dialect


Tuscan is a set of Italo-Dalmatian varieties of Romance mainly spoken in Tuscany, Italy.
Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, specifically on its Florentine dialect, and it became the language of culture throughout Italy due to the prestige of the works by Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini. It would later become the official language of all the Italian states and of the Kingdom of Italy when it was formed.

Subdialects

In "De vulgari eloquentia", Dante Alighieri distinguishes four main subdialects: fiorentino, senese, lucchese and aretino.
Tuscan is a dialect complex composed of many local variants, with minor differences among them.
The main subdivisions are between Northern Tuscan dialects, the Southern Tuscan dialects, and Corsican.
The Northern Tuscan dialects are :
The Southern Tuscan dialects are :
Corsican on the island of Corsica and the Corso-Sardinian transitional varieties spoken in northern Sardinia are classified by scholars as a direct offshoot from medieval Tuscan, even though they now constitute a distinct linguistic group.

Speakers

Excluding the inhabitants of Province of Massa and Carrara, who speak an Emilian variety of a Gallo-Italic language, around 3,500,000 people speak the Tuscan dialect.

Dialectal features

The Tuscan dialect as a whole has certain defining features, with subdialects that are distinguished by minor details.

Phonetics

Tuscan gorgia

The Tuscan gorgia affects the voiceless stop consonants and. They are often pronounced as fricatives in post-vocalic position when not blocked by the competing phenomenon of syntactic gemination:
A phonetic phenomenon is the intervocalic weakening of the Italian soft g, the voiced affricate and soft c, the voiceless affricate , known as attenuation, or, more commonly, as deaffrication.
Between vowels, the voiced post-alveolar affricate consonant is realized as voiced post-alveolar fricative :
→.

This phenomenon is very evident in daily speech : the phrase la gente, 'the people', in standard Italian is pronounced, but in Tuscan it is.
Similarly, the voiceless post-alveolar affricate is pronounced as a voiceless post-alveolar fricative between two vowels:
→.

The sequence la cena, 'the dinner', in standard Italian is pronounced, but in Tuscan it is. As a result of this weakening rule, there are a few minimal pairs distinguished only by length of the voiceless fricative.

Affrication of S

A less common phonetic phenomenon is the realization of "voiceless s" as the voiceless alveolar affricate when preceded by,, or.
→.

For example, il sole, pronounced in standard Italian as, would be in theory pronounced by a Tuscan speaker. However, since assimilation of the final consonant of the article to the following consonant tends to occur in exactly such cases the actual pronunciation will be usually. Affrication of can more commonly be heard word-internally, as in falso →. This is a common phenomenon in Central Italy, but it is not exclusive to that area; for example it also happens in Switzerland.

No dipththongization of

There are two Tuscan historical outcomes of Latin ŏ in stressed open syllables. Passing first through a stage, the vowel then develops as a diphthong. This phenomenon never gained universal acceptance, however, so that while forms with the diphthong came to be accepted as standard Italian, the monophthong remains in popular speech.

Morphology

Accusative "te" for "tu"

A characteristic of Tuscan dialect is the use of the accusative pronoun te in emphatic clauses of the type "You! What are you doing here?".
A morphological phenomenon, cited also by Alessandro Manzoni in his masterpiece "I promessi sposi", is the doubling of the dative pronoun.
For the use of a personal pronoun as indirect object, also called dative case, the standard Italian makes use of a construction preposition + pronoun a me, or it makes use of a synthetic pronoun form, mi. The Tuscan dialect makes use of both in the same sentence as a kind of intensification of the dative/indirect object:
This usage is widespread throughout the central regions of Italy, not only in Tuscany, and is often considered redundant and erroneous by language purists.
In some dialects the double accusative pronoun me mi vedi can be heard, but it is considered an archaic form.

Masculine definite articles

The singular and plural masculine definite articles can both be realized phonetically as in Florentine varieties of Tuscan, but are distinguished by their phonological effect on following consonants. The singular provokes lengthening of the following consonant: 'the dog', whereas the plural permits consonant weakening: 'the dogs'. As in Italian, masc. sing. lo occurs before consonants long by nature or not permitting in clusters is normal, although forms such as i zio can be heard in rustic varieties.

Noi + impersonal ''si''

A morpholosyntactic phenomenon found throughout Tuscany is the personal use of the particle identical to impersonal si, as the first person plural. It is basically the same as the use of on in French.
It's possible to use the construction si + Third person in singular, which can be preceded by the first plural person pronoun noi.
The phenomenon is found in all verb tenses, including compound tenses. In these tenses, the use of si requires a form of essere as auxiliary verb. If the verb is one that otherwise selects auxiliary avere in compound constructions, the past participle does not agree with the subject in gender and number:
If the verb normally requires essere, the past participle is marked as plural:
Usually si contracts before è: si è → s'è.

Fo (faccio) and vo (vado)

Another morphological phenomenon in the Tuscan dialect is what might appear to be shortening of first singular verb forms in the present tense of fare and andare.
These forms have two origins. Natural phonological change alone can account for loss of and reduction of to in the case of > * >. A case such as Latin: sapio > Italian so, however, admits no such phonological account: the expected outcome of would be *, with a normal lengthening of the consonant preceding yod.
What seems to have taken place is a realignment of the paradigm in accordance with the statistically minor but highly frequent paradigms of dare and stare. Thus so, sai, sa, sanno come to fit the template of do, dai, dà, danno, sto, stai, sta, stanno, and fo, fai, fa, fanno follows the same pattern. The form vo, while quite possibly a natural phonological development, seems to have been reinforced by analogy in this case.

Loss of infinitival "-re"

A phonological phenomenon that might appear to be a morphological one is the loss of the infinitival ending -re of verbs.
Stress remains on the same vowel that is stressed in the full form, so that the infinitive can come to coincide with various conjugated singulars: pèrde 'to lose', pèrde 's/he loses'; finì 'to finish', finì 's/he finished'. This homophony seldom, if ever, causes confusion, as they usually appear in distinct syntactic contexts.
While the infinitive without -re is universal in some subtypes such as Pisano-Livornese, in the vicinity of Florence alternations are regular, so that the full infinitive appears when followed by a pause, and the clipped form is found when phrase internal. The consonant of enclitics is lengthened if preceded by stressed vowel, but not when the preceding vowel of the infinitive is unstressed.
A similar process is found in Catalan and its dialects. Final infinitive -r is not pronounced, so anar is realised as /ə'na/, as well as in Campidanese Sardinian.

Lexicon

The biggest differences among dialects is in the lexicon, which also distinguishes the different subdialects.
The Tuscan lexicon is almost entirely shared with standard Italian, but many words may be perceived as obsolete or literary by non-Tuscans. There are a number of strictly regional words and expressions too.
Characteristically Tuscan words: