Neapolitan language

Neapolitan (autonym: ('o n)napulitano [(o n)näpuli't̪ɑːnə]; Italian: napoletano) is a Romance language of the Southern Italo-Romance group spoken in most of continental Southern Italy. It is named after the Kingdom of Naples, which once covered most of the area, and the city of Naples was its capital. On 14 October 2008, a law by the Region of Campania stated that Neapolitan was to be protected.

While the language group is native to much of continental Southern Italy or the former Kingdom of Naples, the terms Neapolitan, napulitano or napoletano may also instead refer more narrowly to the specific variety spoken natively in the city of Naples and the immediately surrounding Naples metropolitan area and Campania region. The present article mostly deals with this variety, which enjoys a certain degree of prestige and has historically wide written attestations.

Largely due to massive Southern Italian migration in the late 19th century and 20th century, there are also a number of Neapolitan speakers in Italian diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and Venezuela^{[citation needed]}. However, in the United States, traditional Neapolitan has had considerable contact with English and the Sicilian languages spoken by Sicilian and Calabrian immigrants living alongside Neapolitan-speaking immigrants and so the Neapolitan in the US is now significantly different from the contemporary Neapolitan spoken in Naples^{[citation needed]}. English words are often used in place of Neapolitan words, especially among second-generation speakers^{[citation needed]}. On the other hand, the effect of Standard Italian on Neapolitan in Italy has been similar because of the increasing displacement of Neapolitan by Standard Italian in daily speech^{[citation needed]}.

Neapolitan is a Romance language and is considered as part of Southern Italo-Romance. There are notable differences among the various dialects, but they are all generally mutually intelligible.

Italian and Neapolitan are of variable mutual comprehensibility, depending on affective and linguistic factors. There are notable grammatical differences, such as Neapolitan having nouns in the neuter form and a unique plural formation, as well as historical phonological developments, which often obscure the cognacy of lexical items.

Its evolution has been similar to that of Italian and other Romance languages from their roots in Vulgar Latin. It may reflect a pre-Latin Oscan substratum, as in the pronunciation of the d sound as an r sound (rhotacism) at the beginning of a word or between two vowels: e.g. doje (feminine) or duje (masculine), meaning "two", is pronounced, and often spelled, as roje/ruje; vedé ("to see") as veré, and often spelled so; also cadé/caré ("to fall") and Madonna/Maronna. Another purported Oscan influence is the historical assimilation of the consonant cluster /nd/ as /nn/, pronounced [nː] (this is generally reflected in spelling more consistently: munno vs Italian mondo "world"; quanno vs Italian quando "when"), along with the development of /mb/ as /mm/~[mː] (tammuro vs Italian tamburo "drum"), also consistently reflected in spelling. Other effects of the Oscan substratum are postulated, but substratum claims are highly controversial. As in many other languages in the Italian Peninsula, Neapolitan has an adstratum greatly influenced by other Romance languages (Catalan, Spanish and Franco-Provençal above all), Germanic languages and Greek (both ancient and modern). The language had never been standardised, and the word for tree has three different spellings: arbero, arvero and àvaro.

Neapolitan has enjoyed a rich literary, musical and theatrical history (notably Giambattista Basile, Eduardo Scarpetta, his son Eduardo De Filippo, Salvatore Di Giacomo and Totò). Thanks to this heritage and the musical work of Renato Carosone in the 1950s, Neapolitan is still in use in popular music, even gaining national popularity in the songs of Pino Daniele and the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare.

The language has no official status within Italy and is not taught in schools. The University of Naples Federico II offers (from 2003) courses in Campanian Dialectology at the faculty of Sociology, whose actual aim is not to teach students to speak the language but to study its history, usage, literature and social role. There are also ongoing legislative attempts at the national level to have it recognized as an official minority language of Italy. It is a recognized ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee language with the ISO 639-3 language code of nap.