Dabbling diary #1: Learning Neapolitan from 30+ hours of TV

View of Naples, and screenshots of Gomorrah cast teaching Neapolitan phrases (Source: Wikimedia Commons and Sky Atlantic)

On top of the hundreds of hours of Netflix in a dozen languages I watched last year, I also recently watched four full seasons of one show that isn’t available on the platform: the Italian crime drama Gomorrah.

The show is based on the 2005 non-fiction investigative book of the same name by Roberto Saviano, and depicts the (cw: extremely violent) activities of organized crime groups in the city of Naples, collectively known as the Camorra.

From a sociolinguistic standpoint, the series is also interesting in that more than 90 percent of its dialog is in the local “dialect”, Neapolitan. That makes Neapolitan a peculiar example of a language that I’ve learned almost entirely through television.

The case of Gomorrah explains Neapolitan greetings. (Youtube)

But first, a quick summary of my prior experience with standard Italian.

Up until a few months ago, if you’d asked me how many languages I spoke, I might have rattled off a list of eight to twelve languages but Italian wouldn’t be one of them. It’s not that I’d never studied it before, or that I didn’t understand quite a bit, but just that I’d never really dedicated that much time to learning it properly like I had with Spanish, French or Portuguese, for example. (The same goes for languages like Bulgarian or Polish, which I wouldn’t claim to speak now although I can read them at a decent level too.)

I had dabbled in Italian in middle school (when first discovering the interesting connections within the Romance language family), and spent a few days in Italy with my family one summer. But apart from that, for a long time Italian sort of fell into an awkward in-between space where it was neither mainstream enough or obscure enough to grab my attention (the same was kind of true of Korean too, up until about two years ago).

But then, I randomly ended up getting interested in Italian again a few months ago, in a roundabout way. In October, I got my hands on a Moroccan Arabic textbook and skimmed through it in a few weeks. After that, I though it might be interesting to dabble in Maltese a bit — which, as you might know, is basically an Arabic dialect with strong Italian/Sicilian influence—and from there I decided to take another look at Italian too. (I was watching a Spanish show and a Turkish show on Netflix at the time, so there was arguably some sort of “Mediterranean” theme in the making.)

Italian turned out to be more interesting than I remembered from previous encounters — and that was before I realized just how different the regional “dialects” are from each other. The first Italian series I watched was Suburra: Blood on Rome, which was mostly in Roman dialect which — despite a few notable peculiarities—is still very much mutually intelligible with standard Italian.

With my appetite whetted for Italian organized crime dramas (I guess), and having seen some positive reviews, I got started on Gomorrah right after that. And once I heard the language, my mind was blown.

I really had no idea about this beforehand, but it seems fair to say that Neapolitan is as different from standard Italian as Portuguese or Catalan is from Spanish. Here are some of the most notable differences, roughly in the order that I noticed them while binge-watching 48 episodes (with Italian subtitles, for what it’s worth):

• The #1 most notable difference of all: unstressed vowels (as and os and es and is) are reduced to a schwa. In writing this is often reflected by replacing the vowel with a comma, but some orthographies keep the etymological spelling. So Napoli “Naples” comes out more like /napələ/
• The “-re” ending on “-are”, “-ire” and stressed “-ere” verbs disappears. (It does seem to be preserved in unstressed “-ere” verbs like fottere “to fuck” though.) Roman dialect does this too.
• In the vocative form of names and titles (i.e. when you’re addressing someone), the part of the word after the stressed syllable gets dropped. So Gennaro becomes Genna’, Dottore becomes Dotto’, and Don Pietro becomes Donpie’ (or almost Dombie’, really). Roman dialect does this too, as do other southern dialects I believe.
• Lots of common words are different. Mo is “now” (also used in Roman, instead of ora or adesso), cca is “here” (instead of qui or qua), piglia’ is “to take” (instead of prendere), cab’ is “head” (instead of testa), buon’ or buo’ is the adverb “well” (instead of bene) and malament’ is used much more than male for “badly” etc.
• Most pronouns are different. First person singular “I” is often i’ instead of io, first person plural is nuje (/’nujə/) instead of noi, third person masculine singular is iss’ instead of lui and third person feminine singular is ess’ instead of lei.
• Articles are different. Definite articles are o and a instead of il and la, and indefinite articles are nu and na instead of un and una.
• Prepositions are different. Di and da usually become ‘e and ‘a. Per is pe (/pə/). In followed by a definite article is indo or inda instead of nel or nella.
• Irregular verbs conjugate differently. Ho “I have” becomes aggi’, abbiamo “we have” becomes amm’. Sono “I am/They are” becomes so’ or song’. Siamo “we are” becomes simm’. So “I know” becomes sacci’. Posso “I can” becomes pozz’, and so on.
• Some examples: “What do we have to do” is ch’ amm’ a ffa instead of cosa dobbiamo fare, “it is me [who does something]” is songh’i instead of sono io.
• Certain turns of phrase seem more common, e.g. tutt’ quant’ for “everybody” instead of just tutti, and tutt’ cos’ for “everything” instead of just tutto (maybe this is to compensate for the vowel reduction, which makes tutti and tutto sound the same?)
• The verb sta(re) is used in many places where Italian uses essere “to be”, e.g. ce sta in stead of c’è for “there is”
• The verb tene(re) “to hold” is used to mean “to have” like in Spanish, instead of the verb avere which is only used as an auxiliary (and in the sense of “to have to do something”)
• /d/ becomes /r/ between vowels sometimes. So ci vediamo domani/dopo “see you tomorrow/later” becomes ce verimm’ riman’/rop’.
• Other sound changes here and there. Giorno “day” is iorn’, fiore “flower” is scior’ (/’ʃorə/), ginocchio “knee” is denocchi’, più “more” is chiù, mangiare “to eat” is magna’….
• Other vocabulary differences, that could be signs of French or Spanish influence? “To buy” is accatta’, which seems cognate with French acheter, instead of comprare. And “sand” is aren’, like Spanish arena but different from the usual Italian sabbia.

I couldn’t learn Neapolitan only through the show, of course. I read the Wikipedia page a few times, and got my hands on a few concise/incomplete grammars (this one and this one) as well as a way-too-detailed historical grammar. I also found a good amount of music (not only traditional music but also hip hop/trap) in Neapolitan, which was helpful for getting a feel for the language from a different source (see the playlist embedded at the end).

Overall, having something like 90 percent of my exposure to a language come from a single TV series was an interesting experience, which I think also highlighted the advantages of television as a medium for language learning. Compared to movies, you get familiarity with a group of characters in a variety of different but related situations over a more extended period. And compared to something like watching the news, you also get exposure to how the language is used in more “real life” situations.

It also helps when a show has an abundance of memorable lines, as this series of comedy shorts on Youtube illustrates:

Beyond the unique features of the Neapolitan language, watching Gomorrah was also really eye-opening in terms of the sociolinguistics of Italian “dialects,” which I knew very little about beforehand. Going into the show, I had really not expected that almost all day-to-day interactions would be conducted in Neapolitan, and that the rare instance where a character switches to standard Italian would be a notable occurrence. There are even a few cases where characters that have received higher education are said to “speak Italian,” which to me implies that the average, uneducated organized crime participant does not in fact speak “Italian.”

For me, of course, this situation immediately made me think of comparisons with the language vs “dialect” situation in China, and in Shanghai in particular. The widespread use of Neapolitan in Naples does seem to be pretty analogous to the use of Shanghainese in informal situations in Shanghai — although if you were to make a realistic TV show about organized crime in modern Shanghai, I’m not sure if such a high percentage of the dialog would be in dialect. (If you made a show about the Republican era Green Gang/青幫, on the other hand, I imagine the vast majority would be in Shanghainese and other Wu dialects.)

In the past month, I also got my hands on books related to other Italian languages like Venetian, Sicilian, and Sardinian, but unfortunately I’m not aware of any critically-acclaimed TV dramas produced in those languages, so I don’t expect to get very far in my attempts to learn more about them. (Although a 2019 miniseries from the same team that made Gomorrah, ZeroZeroZero, does seem like it should have a good amount of Calabrian dialog. 🤔)

Another takeaway from my random meandering language dabbling in the past few months is that whenever I say I’m not particularly interested in a language, all that means is that I’ll end up being super-interested in it a year or two later, apparently. That’s what happened with Italian just now, and Korean a few years earlier, and Hindi several years before that. So I guess that means in 2022 I’ll be really into… Danish? I guess we’ll see.

Anyway, as far as my Mediterranean language round tour is concerned, my attention has already been drifting towards yet another language in past few weeks. More on that next time!