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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Italian dialects can be mutually unintelligible too. TV and internal migrations consolidated standard Italian to the point that local dialects are basically dead in some areas (for example Milan) but there are people in smaller cities that are actively bilingual, their dialect and Italian.

My father remembers that they could tell the town of origin of somebody by little variations of accent and vocabulary, over distances of less than 10 km in a well populated and well connected area centered around Milan.

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> local dialects are basically dead in some areas (for example Milan)

Uela, you have to consider that Milanese dialects basically overlapped modern Italian already - as standardized on the works of Alessandro Manzoni, a writer from Milan. The accents still survive though, and even a few words.

It's incredibly funny to observe language in motion. At one point in the '90s, a few rappers living in the city I come from (Bologna) popularized a bunch of local slang in their songs. Nowadays, youngsters from Milan use that slang as native and strongly believe it originated there.

Do they use it correctly? Example: the roman "sti c...i" is very often used with the opposite meaning of the original here, that is: as a surprise, probably by guessing.

And by the way, "bagaglio" always surprises people here.

For the non Italians, among the other things the Milan accent basically swaps the open and closed e sounds. I have to change the way I say spaghetti when I'm outside region :-)

> My father remembers that they could tell the town of origin of somebody by little variations of accent and vocabulary.

I have seen this in Ireland where upon meeting someone new, one Irish person would guess the other person as coming from a small village (of a few hundred people).

This is somewhat true, but many of the accents are not as strong anymore.

The Irish language itself is interesting. Before standardisation, I'm told the Irish of the north of the island was more similar to Scots Gaelic than that of the south. Many of the regional dialects have disappeared now though.

I can tell apart from whick village around my home village comes from just by hearing them say the word "eier" (eggs).

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