Italian Dialects

Even for linguists, the line between "dialect" and "language" is fuzzy, or at least not unanimously agreed to. Sardinian, Sicilian, Neapolitan, Calabrian, Venetian and Friulian are all considered "languages" by Ethnologue and "dialects" by the Italian government. Most of them, Friulian and Sicilian in particular, are so influenced by non-Romance language elements as to be utterly unintelligible to an Italian speaker. In the modern era, the dialects of Italian are restricted to verbal exchanges between native speakers, and are seldom written, published, or distributed by the mass media. For many youth in Italy, the speaking of a language other than standard Italian has the connotation of backwardness, ignorance and poverty.