Which kind of Italian dialect is the most beautiful one?

Guest   Sat Feb 09, 2008 3:08 am GMT
Probably in the United States. Boston?
Guest   Sat Feb 09, 2008 3:12 am GMT
G-talk,

What is your own opinion on Italian and do you speak it? Please share some audio samples.

I like a clean-sounding Italian, but that really tells you nothing, I know.
Guest   Sat Feb 09, 2008 3:35 am GMT
Italian sounds very clean anyway no matter the dialect. If you are used to trying to decipher English speakers , Italian will result very clean-sounding.
Rolando   Mon Feb 11, 2008 3:03 pm GMT
Italian Dialects...? Isent that hard to learn... so many dialects?
Guest   Tue Feb 12, 2008 3:29 pm GMT
Tuscan is not standard
Guest   Tue Feb 12, 2008 6:35 pm GMT
<<Is it true that the Italian spoken in Torino sounds a bit like French?>>

When they speak standard Italian, it just sounds like standard Italian.
When they speak their local dialect (Piedmontese) it's different.

Piedmontese shares a lot of features with Occitan and even French. In Charlemagne's time it couldn't even be counted among the Italian dialects (plural marker was '-s' like in all Western Romance languages).

Piedmontese has been strongly italianized since then but lexicon has still a lot of words unknown in any other Italian dialect but that are found in French and/or Catalan.

Furthermore, for centuries social elites in Turin used to speak French, as Piedmontese was deemed as too vulgar and Italian as too foreign.

King Vittorio-Emanuele and his prime minister Cavour, who unified Italy under the crown of Piedmont-Sardinia, used only French when they addressed each other or their ministers. When Cavour had to write a speech in Italian he used a dictionary!

A remnant of this "frenchification" is that some members of the Agnelli family (the owners of the FIAT automotive concern) find more fashionable to pronounce their "r's" in the French way.
Guest   Tue Feb 12, 2008 6:45 pm GMT
<<Where do they speak the weirdest Italian?>>

In terms of quantity and frequency: in the South, and in the North-East (Veneto), where people use dialect much more than standard Italian.

In qualitative terms: the inherently weirdest dialects are heard in Bologna, Genoa, and Bergamo, but locals rarely use them, fortunately (they are absolutely unintelligible, believe me).
Guest   Tue Feb 12, 2008 7:00 pm GMT
What is the most musical Italian dialect, and the least one?
Guest   Tue Feb 12, 2008 8:38 pm GMT
- What is the most musical Italian dialect?

Venetian, but other Italians find it just effeminate.
To be preferred for women. Otherwise it's gay.

- and the least one?

Piedmontese. It sounds dry, authoritative, arrogant, military.
JLK   Tue Feb 12, 2008 8:46 pm GMT
Then I prefer Venetian.
Guest   Tue Feb 12, 2008 10:24 pm GMT
Josh,
This thread got stupid. Lock.
Guest   Sun Feb 24, 2008 4:06 pm GMT
Tuscan and Roman (from Rome) accents are the most prestigious.
Standard Italian is based on dialects of central Italy (Tuscan, but also Umbrian and Roman)
Guest   Sun Feb 24, 2008 4:10 pm GMT
Milanese is very closed-mouthed, it's like NYC accent in US English.
It's considered a working class accent. Fancy people in Milan put on a Tuscan/standard dialect.
Guest   Sun Feb 24, 2008 4:14 pm GMT
Tuscan and Roman always score high in internet polls:
http://www.p2pforum.it/forum/showthread.php?t=12269