31,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture
- Sprache: Englisch
Living Memory investigates the complex question of language and its place at the heart of Bergamasco culture in northern Italy.
• Integrates extensive participant observation with sociolinguistic data collection
• Reveals the political and social dynamics of a national language (Italian) and a local dialect (Bergamasco) struggling for survival
• Introduces the original concept of the “social aesthetics of language”: the interweaving of culturally-shaped and emotionally felt dimensions of language-choice
• Written to be accessible to students and specialists alike
• Part of the Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 477
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture
Title page
Copyright page
Series Editor’s Preface
Preface
Acknowledgments
Constructing Transcripts: Orthographic Conventions and Transcription Processes
What is Bergamasco?
1 Introduction
A Local Place in the Heart of the Periphery
The Local Social Aesthetics of Language
A Modern Questione della Lingua
My Place in Bergamo
Transcribing
Outline of Chapters
2 Bergamasco in Use: The Feel of Everyday Speaking
Heteroglossia, Bivalency, and the Feel of Language
Why Bergamasco
Example 2.1
Example 2.2
Why NOT Bergamasco
Example 2.3
Being Bergamasco
Example 2.4
Example 2.5
Sounding Bergamasco
Example 2.6
Being Italian “in a Bergamasco way”
Example 2.7
Indexicality in Action
Example 2.8
Who Is the Joke On?
Example 2.9
Conclusion
3 Gendering Language
Sounding Bergamasco
Example 3.1
Women as Linguistic Care-givers
Example 3.2
Example 3.3
Revitalizing Activity
Conclusion
4 Bergamasco on Stage: Poetry and Theater
Experiencing Bergamasco Poetry First-hand
Example 4.1 I Mé Pé3 (My Feet)
Example 4.2
Why I Mé Pé?
Poetry Performed
Poetry as Cultural Revitalization
Contextualizing Poetry
“La Zét D’Öna Ólta”: The People of Long Ago
Characterizing Bergamasco Dialect Theater
Theater as a Revitalization Activity
Theater and Poetry as Pragmatic Genres
Conclusion
5 Modern Campanilismo: The Value of Place
Campanilismo: Place-Making and Meaning-Making
Continuity of Place
Experiencing and Embracing the Transition
From Rich to Poor to Rich Again: The Changing Faces of the Città Alta
Symbolic Campanilismo and the Modern 3 Ps: Pizze, Passegiate, Panorame
Example 5.1
Experiencing Place
Conclusions: Worrying About the Città Alta
6 Bergamo, Italy, Europe: Speaking Contextualized
Language Politics: Fascism and Integralism
Cultural Champions
The Ducato Today
Example 6.1
Integralist Politics: The Value of the Local
Immigrants in Bergamo
European Belonging Against the Other
Conclusion
7 Conclusion
Worrying and Celebrating in the New Millennium
The Social Aesthetics of Language
The Politics of Language and Linguistic Choice
Living Memory: Does Bergamasco Have a Future?
References
Index
Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture
Linguistic anthropology evolved in the 20th century in an environment that tended to reify language and culture. A recognition of the dynamics of discourse as a sociocultural process has since emerged as researchers have used new methods and theories to examine the reproduction and transformation of people, institutions, and communities through linguistic practices. This transformation of linguistic anthropology itself heralds a new era for publishing as well. Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture aims to represent and foster this new approach to discourse and culture by producing books that focus on the dynamics that can be obscured by such broad and diffuse terms as “language.” This series is committed to the ethnographic approach to language and discourse: ethnographic works deeply informed by theory, as well as more theoretical works that are deeply grounded in ethnography. The books are aimed at scholars in the sociology and anthropology of language, anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics and socioculturally informed psycholinguistics. It is our hope that all books in the series will be widely adopted for a variety of courses.
Series Editor
James M. Wilce (PhD University of California, Los Angeles) is Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University. He serves on the editorial board of American Anthropologist and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. He has published a number of articles and is the author of Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh (1998) and Language and Emotion (forthcoming) and the editor of Social and Cultural Lives of Immune Systems (2003).
Editorial Board:
In the Series:
This paperback edition first published 2012
© 2012 Jillian R. Cavanaugh
Edition History: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2009)
Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.
Registered Office
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
Editorial Offices
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.
The right of Jillian R. Cavanaugh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cavanaugh, Jillian R.
Living Memory : The social aesthetics of language in a northern Italian town/Jillian R. Cavanaugh.
p. cm. – (Blackwell studies in discourse and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-6882-3 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-118-27743-0 (paperback: alk. paper) 1. Sociolinguistics–Italy–Bergamo. 2. Language and culture–Italy–Bergamo. 3. Italian language–Dialects–Italy–Bergamo. 4. Bergamo (Italy)–Intellectual life–21st century. I. Title.
P40.45.I8C38 2009
306.440945′24–dc22
2008048207
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Photograph by Scott Collard.
Cover design by Design Deluxe.
Series Editor’s Preface
Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture was launched in 2005, committed to publishing books whose ethnographic approach to language and discourse contributes to linguistic-anthropological theory. Jillian Cavanaugh’s Living Memory is just such a work. Cavanaugh’s profoundly engaging account illuminates precisely the issues outlined in the goals of the series: namely, to address issues such as:
the global and local dynamics of the production, reception, circulation, and contextualization of discourse;
the discursive production of social collectivities;
the dynamic relation of speech acts to agents, social roles, and identities;
the emergent relation of ideologies to linguistic structure and the social life of linguistic forms; and
the dialectical relations of local speech events to larger social formations and centers of power.
This book stands out as a remarkable contribution to our understanding of “the social aesthetics of language,” as the subtitle promises. It demonstrates the profound links between sentiment and structures of power, between feelings and the forces shaping social practice in general and speaking in particular. Few if any ethnographies so effectively map the intersection of emotion, practice, ideology, and history. The uniqueness of Cavanaugh’s accomplishment involves her success at each of the following, and offering a breathtaking synthesis: 1) conveying the feel of speaking Bergamasco (a sense acquired through the intimacies of participant observation in, for example, performances of Bergamasco plays) and Italian, 2) analyzing contemporary tensions between the imagining of “pure” forms of Italian and Bergamasco (each purged of the other’s influence) and the actual practice of speaking in mixed forms, and 3) recounting the social history of ideologies – particularly ideologies of language, such as purism.
Thus, this work establishes Cavanaugh as a leading figure illuminating the social aesthetics of language, and particularly the triadic relationship of speaking and feeling in which language is recruited as a medium of emotional expression, an index of affectively valenced gender performance, and an object of emotional identification. The first is exemplified in local enthusiasts’ assertion that particular Bergamasco words are more “immediately expressive” than their Italian counterparts. The complexities of the second link desirability in the heterosexual marketplace to speaking Italian in the case of women, and Bergamasco in the case of men. The third involves nostalgia for the local code itself – and its presumed impending loss. Paolo Frér, the poet/performer whose life and passing Cavanaugh movingly describes, could recruit Bergamasco as the perfect tool for expressing emotional attachment to place (Bergamo’s Città Alta), while his audience shouted their appreciation of the poet, his particular idiom, and the Bergamasco language more generally. Paolo exemplifies men’s duty to do what they can to “save Bergamasco.” His audience’s appreciation, and widely circulating nostalgic assertions of the impending loss of Bergamasco, have – Cavanaugh shows us – arisen out of the history of Italian politics since the 1920s. National policy since the Fascist period has not simply adopted various means of suppressing “dialects” but has in effect contributed to their decline precisely, if paradoxically, through representing them as dying.
Happily, Cavanaugh exemplifies the complex relation of language(s) to feeling that is her subject. Hers is that rare work that combines careful and convincing intellectual argument about the double-faceted aesthetics of language described above with a style that helps readers – like Paolo’s audience – feel the place, the people, and what is at stake in the unfolding history. Cavanaugh’s accomplishment reflects the richness of data collected through diverse methods, effectively synthesized. The stories she tells seethe with feeling, but it is just as important that her writing brings this home to us so powerfully.
Thus Living Memory takes its place alongside its esteemed predecessors. To Cavanaugh, our thanks. To the reader, an invitation to encounter Bergamo with as much empathy as you can muster. Welcome to the world of discourse and culture as they meet in lived experience.
Preface
The year I was 15, my family moved to Florence for a year. We moved there so that my sister and I would learn about another culture; I came home with a widened perspective on the world, fluent in Italian, and with a fascination of language in general and Italian ways of speaking in particular that endures. Perhaps it began the day that my classmates in the Italian high school I attended that year taught me a Florentine tongue twister: una Coca-Cola con la conuncia corta-corta (a Coke with a very short straw). It’s obviously not what the phrase means that matters, but how it is properly said by Florentines: una Hoha-Hola hon la honunsha horta-horta. My friends hooted with laughter as they coached me, and then made me say it to everyone we met when I had learned it correctly. These performances always made the recipients laugh, pronounce me ‘brava!’ (good, smart), and then comment on how very Florentine I had become in so short a time. Not Italian, but Florentine – that’s what mattered to those who heard me say this short phrase. Later in the year, as my Florentine accent flourished, when I told people I met that I was an “ameri-Hana” (not an “ameri-Cana”, as it would have been in a standard Italian accent), I received the same set of evaluations. By dropping my ‘c’s just like other Florentines, I became local, leap-frogging the national boundaries that separated me from my friends there.
It became resoundingly clear how very locally anchored in Florence I had become when my family and I visited Pisa, mere kilometers away, and my Florentine-accented Italian was met with cold shoulders and rude comments, while my parents’ hesitant, American-accented Italian was appreciated and welcomed. When I told my Florentine friends about it when we returned to Florence, they laughed and told me a Florentine proverb: “it’s better to have a death in the family, than a Pisan at the door.” Pisans evidently have the same saying about Florentines; their mutual animosity dates back centuries to when they were independent, warring city-states. While I was amused to be an American teenager caught up in a centuries-old feud between Italian cities, this incident sparked a recognition of how deep connections to local places are in Italy, how these connections are expressed through bits of language like accents, and how Italians use local identities and ways of speaking to define themselves vis-à-vis each other, the Italian nation-state, and others from abroad.
Later during my graduate studies in the late 1990s and fieldwork in the early 2000s in another part of Italy, I learned that the different ways of speaking I had experienced as a teenager in Italy were common across the peninsula. While these linguistic varieties are considered to be in the process of being lost, many Italians continue to use them and value them. In Italy, the questione della lingua – language question – has always been a socioeconomic, political, and cultural issue. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, local ways of speaking primarily set localities apart from one another, as well as helped orient their speakers to the centralized nation-state. In the 1990s, increasing immigration and Europeanization meant that locality was increasingly called on to help Florentines, Pisans, and all Italians orient themselves within larger contexts as well. This is not to say that Italians have not long looked beyond their own boundaries – extensive emigration to the Americas, Australia, and Northern Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century; participation in two World Wars; and decades of consumption of media forms from abroad, for instance, have connected the particular places of Italy to other places further afield. However, the 1990s and then early 2000s have posed their own sets of challenges, and language – and how it is used, felt, and reflected upon – can be a valuable tool for helping to understand these challenges.
Indeed, so many of the pressing issues that Italians – as well as other Europeans, and people around the globe – face today can be productively viewed through the lens of language: who are we in relation to our neighbors, near and far? How should we bring up our children? What is the best way to pursue a livelihood? What does our past mean? What should we leave behind and what do we need to bring with us in order to make the present and the future meaningful? This book aims to use language to begin to answer these questions for one small community in northern Italy.
Acknowledgments
In Bergamo, I have been fortunate to meet many generous people to help me formulate and begin to answer these questions. So many Bergamaschi welcomed me into their busy lives and homes, and I am honored to call them friends. I give my thanks and gratitude to the families and friends who welcomed us and made us feel at home: the Zoppetti, the Scuri, and the Pizzigalli-Fazio, as well as Maria Stefania, Franco, Giorgio Paolo, Mariuccia and everyone at Passemezzo, and everyone in my compagnia teattrale, especially Rosella and Elia. A debt of gratitude goes to Roberta, Erika, Elena, Elisa, and Daniele without whom the transcriptions would have been impossible, and much less fun. Vittorio Mora shared his expertise, and many Bergamasco poets shared their work and inspirations with me. At the Ducato di Piazza Pontida, I thank the Duke, my classmates, and especially Carmelo Francia, for helping me understand the value of Bergamasco. Thanks also go to the Ateneo, and to the Biblioteca Civica, for their help, as well as to Chris Carlsmith for introducing me to Bergamo in the first place. My appreciation to the sciure at the Scuola della Nonna and the Centro Sociale della Città Alta, and to Paola Schellenbaum, whose ongoing interest and conversation has enlivened this project since that first rainy day.
A number of individuals and organizations have supported this work since its inception. Research and write-up support has been generously provided by a number of organizations: the International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program at the Social Science Research Council; the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; the National Science Foundation, Linguistics Program (Dr. Bambi B. Schieffelin, PI); the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Council for European Studies’ Pre-Dissertation Fellowship Program; and New York University’s Dean’s Summer Fellowship for Preliminary PhD Research at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Program. Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Research Foundation have been generous in their support of this project, awarding me a Tow Faculty Research Fellowship, several PSC-CUNY Research Awards, and a Whiting Fellowship.
This book and the dissertation that preceded it have benefited from a number of readers who have provided important comments, insights, and questions. The biggest thanks go to Bambi Schieffelin, advisor, mentor, and friend, without whom none of this would have been possible. Her insight, generosity with her time and energy, patience, and ability to see to the heart of the matter are truly an inspiration. I am grateful to Don Kulick for many close readings and conversations before, during, and after fieldwork, and to Susan Rogers, Alessandro Duranti and Jane Schneider, for sharing their expertise and insightful comments. The text is incalculably richer due to the close reading and astute commentary of all these readers.
A number of other scholars have helped this text find shape in a number of ways throughout the years. I am indebted to Fred Myers, Ron Kassimir, Miyako Inoue, Judith Irvine, Alexandra Jaffe, Kathryn Woolard, Rob Moore, Steve Feld, Glauco Sanga, Franco Luràa, Franco Brevini, Cristina Grasseni, Stefano Coveri, Antonio Marazzi, and Giuliano Bernini. Emily McEwan-Fujita, Dan Suslak, and Suzanne Wertheim have been helpful interlocutors, and Shalini Shankar and Katherine Hoffman have contributed at more points than I can count; this text would be immeasurably poorer without them. Thanks also go to everyone at Wiley-Blackwell, including my editor, Rosalie Robertson, Julia Kirk, Deirdre Ilkson, and Paul Stringer. I’m grateful to Jim Wilce, Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture series editor, for asking hard questions, and giving such good feedback.
None of this would ever have happened, of course, if my parents had not taken us to Italy in the first place; nor could those initial interests have been developed without their ongoing love and support. Thanks to my whole family for their love and support, and especially Mom and Doug, who thought it was so important their daughters experience how other people live. Finally, thanks to Scott Collard, who has provided loving support, numerous delicious meals, generous copy-editing, an ongoing soundtrack, and kept me grounded in what it is really all about; and Rawlins, who has made it all the more fun.
Earlier formulations of some of the material in Chapter 3 appeared in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (2006) 16(2):194–210.
Constructing Transcripts: Orthographic Conventions and Transcription Processes
Nearly all of the transcripts in this work came out of my collaborative efforts with native-speaker transcription consultants. In these transcribing contexts, there were no pre-established rules for how the Bergamasco language was written, as my consultants were unfamiliar with the current (or any other) orthographic conventions for writing it.1 This process produced complex, multilayered transcripts, with each transcriber’s interests shaping how the transcript was produced. There were five of them: Anna, Rina, Ella, Elsa, and Daniele, all between 23 and 40 years old.2 Anna, in her late thirties, and Rina, in her early thirties, were both “laureata” (had college degrees), and had taken linguistics degrees.3 Ella and Elsa, both in their mid-twenties, were working on their laurea degrees in languages (Lingue). Although he was older (mid-thirties), Daniele was also working on his laurea in literature, having entered the workforce at an early age and then later gone back to school. Rina, Ella, Elsa, and Daniele are Bergamaschi (pl. Bergamasco) and spoke and/or heard the Bergamasco language on a daily or nearly daily basis. Anna was born in the nearby town of Lecco (the local vernacular of which is very similar to Bergamasco), but had lived in Bergamo for several years and was married to a Bergamasco man. All professed an interest in the local language and said it would be a shame if it were lost. However, only Daniele was involved in any type of language activism. As an active member of the political party the Northern League, Daniele was explicit about his pro-Bergamasco stance, and often organized local language-related events, such as poetry readings, in his small hometown in the province of Bergamo on the plains south of Bergamo.
We worked together in two different ways. Anna, Elsa, and Daniele made their own initial transcriptions of various events, which we subsequently discussed line-by-line, often word-by-word. With Ella and Rina, we transcribed together, sitting side-by-side with two pairs of headphones. I listened and they wrote, and we stopped often to discuss both the content and structure of what we were hearing: the meaning of a particular word or phrase as well as which speaker had said what, for example. Both methods are time-consuming and render richly layered transcripts for analysis, but the second method was particularly painstaking. Occasionally, we would be able to transcribe only a few pages in a two or three hour session, either because of the difficulty of the recording – Ella and I transcribed sections of a recording made over a long meal with 12 participants, for instance, which took several transcribing sessions – or because we ran into something particularly interesting that we wanted to discuss, such as why a particular vowel sound made a speaker sound so very Bergamasco. Wherever possible, I wrote down their comments on the transcripts we produced; I have retained these traces of our interactions in some of the transcripts used in this book.
When we first began transcribing, I framed it as a project with two aims. First, I wanted them, as native speakers, to help me understand and correctly represent the speech on my tapes. Second, I also hoped for them to help me understand when speakers spoke one language or the other, and formulate reasons why this happened. For this reason, I asked them to give me their opinions and evaluations about what was happening in the recordings, and what they thought of when they heard people speak. None of my transcription consultants were present at these recordings, or knew the speakers who were, which helped to keep their comments on a general, not personal, level. Instead of “insider” knowledge about the dynamics of a particular group or conversation, what I desired – and got – was commentary on what people were doing with language, and potential reasons why.4 I looked for patterns in how they evaluated when and why speakers used each language, as well as what these choices meant to them as Bergamaschi.
One of the first tasks I set out was to indicate whether an utterance or a word was in Italian or Bergamasco, so that I could track on a basic level how much of each language was being used. I did not initially anticipate what a complex task this occasionally was, however, involving extensive discussions of whether to categorize a particular word or element as Italian or Bergamasco. These discussions often took up a good deal of the transcription sessions, providing extensive metalinguistic commentary on bivalent moments, when an utterance displayed lexical, morphosyntactic, and/or phonological elements of both Italian and Bergamasco. In many ways, these discussions became investigations into what it was that made speakers sound “Bergamasco” to the transcribers, progressing from a transcriber’s judgment that an utterance or a word “sounded Bergamasco” or “wasn’t good Italian” to a closer look at exactly what it was that produced this perception. Transcribers also offered negative or positive evaluations of different examples of speech, and Anna and Rina paid special attention to what they saw as deviations from standard Italian and notated them accordingly due to their training in sociolinguistics. This type of attention often evolved into discussions of whether to define instances of non-standard Italian as “Regional” (variation linked to locality) or as “Popular” (variation linked to class), demonstrating how interconnected these categorizations are when they are applied to actual examples of speech (for discussions, see, among others, Berruto 1989, Cortelazzo 1977, and Pei 1941). Throughout, it was obvious that we were producing much more than a transparent or objective representation of the recordings we were listening to; indeed, the choices that we arrived at demonstrated how the process of transcription is anything but transparent or objective (Haviland 1996; Ochs 1979). Our own intellectual and social interests informed what we found, represented, and highlighted in our transcripts.
Such interests were not unique to us. While transcribing sessions evoked a level of commentary that would be unusual in everyday conversation, these ways of attending to language were not out of the ordinary in particular contexts. Audience members at poetry readings and dialect theater performances often favorably commented on the use of particular Bergamasco words or phrases, noting that there are certain things that just cannot be said in Italian.5 Likewise, in highly formal contexts where standard Italian was the expected language, such as television or radio newscasts or speeches by public officials, Bergamaschi (like all Italians) displayed an incredible delicacy in detecting regional and local accents, which act as phonological traces of a speaker’s origin. Speakers sometimes offered their own examples of “bad Italian” or pointed to others as speakers of “real Bergamasco.” So while the precision with which a transcriber pinpointed a specific element as what made an utterance sound particularly Bergamasco was perhaps exceptional to the transcribing sessions, the types of linguistic phenomena they paid attention to were similar to phenomena that elicited comment in everyday life when language itself became the focus. The transcribers’ comments often provided acute crystallizations of viewpoints I heard across other contexts in everyday life.
Discussions with Daniele about transcriptions were different than discussions with the other transcription consultants because of his political beliefs. With the other transcribers, politics only occasionally entered into our discussions, making it clear to me that their pride of place or recognition of certain structural inequalities in Italy did not translate to any form of political support for Bergamasco or other dialects. With Daniele, however, our interactions tended to be less linguistically oriented and more politically oriented. Daniele transcribed several one-on-one interviews in which the speakers used mostly Italian, and while he expressed pleasure when Bergamasco occurred, seeing it as a sign of a positive local attitude that he applauded, he had little interest in discussing the whys and mechanics of those occurrences. Instead of wanting to explore what code-switches between Bergamasco and Italian or using a Bergamasco accent might signify, he knew already: they were signs of local-ness, that the speaker was inherently and justly attached to Bergamasco, despite the force of Italian and the Italian nation-state. Eventually, I let him take the lead in our discussions, recognizing him as a different type of local analyst. Observations about language often led to Daniele telling me about various Northern League initiatives or events in support of the dialect or Bergamasco culture, which then led to general discussions of politics, the genius as well as failing health of Umberto Bossi (the charismatic leader of the Northern League), the Celtic origin of so many Bergamasco words, the odious dealings of politicians in Rome – in short, all of the topics and viewpoints that were common to nearly all the leghisti (Northern Leaguers, pl. of leghista) I interacted with. The rhetoric became familiar to me as I spent time with a number of leghisti, and Daniele provided a clear window onto this position (see Chapter 6 for a more complete discussion of the Northern League).
What is Bergamasco?
Bergamasco differs from Italian lexically, morphosyntactically, and phonologically (Sanga 1987, 1997). Lexical differences tend to cluster in particular domains, especially those most related to domestic tasks and the types of work that Bergamaschi traditionally participated in. So, for example, there are a number of specifically Bergamasco lexical items associated with silkworm husbandry, once an important way for many Bergamasco agriculturalists to earn cash. Morphosyntactic differences primarily involve the presence of compulsory subject clitic verb forms, postverbal negation, definite article forms (masc. sing. ‘ol’; fem. pl. ‘i’), and some verbal forms (such as pres. ind. 1sing. ending –[e]). Phonologically, Bergamasco differs from Italian primarily through the tendency towards degemination, the presence of two front rounded vowels ([ø] and [Y]), the occurrence of [s + t∫], and the loss of word final vowels.6
There have been no studies on the mutual intelligibility of Italian and Bergamasco, although anecdotal evidence and my own research suggest that attitudes impact monolingual Italian speakers’ ability to understand Bergamasco (there are presently extremely few monolingual Bergamasco speakers). Some Italian speakers, for example, deny understanding a word of it, while others might claim that they understand it, though it sounds “odd” (strano) or “hard” (duro) to their ears.7
Current Bergamasco orthography primarily follows that of Italian, but diverges in its extensive use of diacritics to indicate vowel sounds. The two front vowel sounds that occur in Bergamasco and not in Italian are represented by ö and ü ([ø] and [Y], respectively pronounced ‘eu’ and ‘u’ as in French); otherwise, acute and grave accents indicate closed or open qualities of [e] and [o]. The diacritic system is complicated and depends on a number of non-phonological requirements (for example, ‘e’ and ‘o’ in prepositions will never receive accents, no matter what they sound like). Another divergence from Italian orthography is the representation of [s + t∫] (a combination not present in Italian) as s-c, as in s-cèta (girl [st∫εta]).
In the transcripts that occur in this book and when Bergamasco appears in the text, I have sought as much as possible to follow the orthographic rules laid down by Vittorio Mora (1966) and taught by Carmelo Francia at the Ducato di Piazza Pontida. I have referred to the 19th-century Bergamasco–Italian dictionary written by Antonio Tiraboschi in addition to the more recent Italian–Bergamasco and Bergamasco–Italian dictionaries produced by Carmelo Francia and Emanuele Gamberini and printed by the Ducato di Piazza Pontida, as well as the one written by Carlo De Sanctis. All translations from Italian and Bergamasco are my own. Whenever possible, I have consulted with Bergamaschi who know more than I about these issues. Any remaining mistakes, of course, are mine.
I adhere to the following conventions in transcripts and in the text:
When Bergamasco and Italian words appear in the text, they are glossed into English (often in parentheses) and in bold or italics only the first time they appear, unless they are quotes, in which case they stay in their original form. Additionally, when attention is paid to particular elements of language, in addition to using IPA symbols when relevant, I apply the following rules:
‘a’ refers to the grapheme, or how the letter or word is written.
[a] is a phonemic representation.
/a/ is a phoneme.
: indicates lengthening of the sound that precedes it.
[ ] Brackets around non-IPA symbols frame transcriber commentary on an utterance, word, sound, which may be in Italian, Bergamasco, or English, or a combination of any of the three.
Notes
1. Bergamasco is an adjective that refers to the language and people from Bergamo. It is also an adjective implying linked to this place, as in “a Bergamasco house.” I use this Anglicized adjective form here, except when referring to people, in which case I follow Italian norms and modify it for gender and number.
2. All names are pseudonyms.
3. The Italian “laurea” requires minimally five years and writing a thesis to complete.
4. When I undertook this research, I intended to enlist transcribers who had been involved in the interactions they transcribed. As this did not prove to be uniformly possible once research was underway, due to a number of reasons, I opted for uniformity in social distance between transcribers and people I recorded, hoping for a perspective that perhaps would have been lacking in the first scenario.
5. Silverstein has noted that speakers tend to be more aware of lexical issues than other types of linguistic phenomena (1981).
6. Drawn from Bernini and Sanga 1987; Berruto 1987; Blondeau 1996; Giannelli and Cravens 1997; Maiden 1995; Maiden and Parry 1997; Mora 1966, 1972; Sanga 1984, 1987, 1997; as well as my own research.
7. An example of this was Eduardo Olmi’s film, L’Albero degli Zoccoli (The Tree of the Wooden Shoes), which featured amateur Bergamasco actors exclusively. After its release, numerous viewers claimed to not understand the dialog and the film was consequently subtitled in Italian.
1
Introduction
I stood at the blackboard, sweating through my shirt, chalk in hand, sounding out vowel sounds under my breath, trying to hear the difference: “Có-mò. Có-mò? Có-mò.” The small room, full to overflowing with local art and knick-knacks, felt close and stuffy; traffic noises outside punctuated the buzz of the fluorescent lights. Behind me, the rest of the class chimed encouragement and aid in Italian: “forza, Americanina!” (go on, little American!), “Dai, lo saprai già!” (Come on, you know this one!). The teacher, who we called Maestro, told me that it was open (the sound of the ‘o’ in the word I was stuck on), which helped, a little. I plunged ahead, writing down the words in Bergamasco, the local language in this northern Italian town, that Maestro had dictated earlier. I got through two, long sentences, receiving lots of hints and corrections as I went along from both Maestro and the rest of the class. It seemed to take forever, but at the end Maestro said, “vabé!” – it was fine, especially since I didn’t really understand what I was writing. Everyone laughed, leaving me completely flustered by the time I sat down. The tall middle-aged woman who sat to my left stood up and took the chalk from me, ready to continue the dictation at the board. She was faster and much better than I was, hardly making any mistakes or needing assistance, sounding out the words with confidence as she wrote. The young man who sat next to her, an ardent supporter of the regional separatist movement, the Northern League, followed her to the board and had nearly as many problems as I had. The young woman on the other side of him – with whom he frequently argued politics – did slightly better, though she queried Maestro on a number of points as she wrote. She, like the woman next to me, was a ripetente – an Italian colloquialism for “flunker” (literally, “repeater”), although they had taken the course repeatedly because they wanted to, not because they had to – and so was more familiar with the myriad rules governing how to write their local language. As the rest of the class went up to the board to write, comments and encouragement in Italian and Bergamasco filled the air, demonstrating that just because you knew how to speak Bergamasco did not necessarily mean you knew how to write it. One older Bergamasco man in particular, who spoke Bergamasco nearly exclusively and had taken the course several times, made numerous mistakes, in spite of Maestro’s repeated corrections. His good-natured Bergamasco curses made the rest of the class laugh; our suggestions joined the Maestro’s to create a chorus of shared effort.
Why make these efforts? Why dedicate an hour and a half every Friday night from October to May, sometimes year after year, to the task of learning how to read and write this – their own – language? The dozen participants that year cited various reasons: because they were aspiring Bergamasco poets, because they wanted to be able to speak it better, because they wanted a good reason to get out of the house and their regular routine once a week, or simply because, “l’è gran bèl, ol bergamàsch” (it’s very beautiful, Bergamasco). They agreed that Italian, which they all spoke, was necessary and ubiquitous during these modern times. But Bergamasco, the language of their ancestors, was the sound that meant “home” to them, and doubly precious as many people perceived it as slipping irrevocably into the past. They saw it also as a direct link to that past, and to many of the cultural practices and values they explicitly valued: hard work, social closeness, honesty, straightforwardness, humor.
Within living memory, Bergamo has been transformed from one of Italy’s poorest provinces into one of Europe’s most prosperous. These changes have in turn altered nearly everything about how Bergamaschi live, eat, work, and play, as well as how they speak. For most people these are not existential issues, but practical ones, which play out in multiple arenas of their everyday lives, from classrooms to dining room tables. They face such transformations as they grapple with how to live in a modern, global world – to look toward the future, meaningfully inhabit the present, but not leave the past behind entirely. People’s everyday lives, the activities they undertake, the places they choose to live, and the ways in which they choose to speak connect them to specific local histories. At the same time, Bergamaschi and Italians from other small communities think of themselves as Italians and Europeans, working in modern jobs that may involve extensive interaction with colleagues across the nation, continent and world; spending euros on their everyday expenses; reading local and national newspapers in order to discuss politics over lunch. Balancing local, national, and international orientations and activities, as well as the influences of tradition and modernity, are concerns that Bergamaschi share with people around the globe. Language, as an everyday practice and symbolic resource, is an essential site for trying to achieve and express this balance.
A Local Place in the Heart of the Periphery
The town of Bergamo, divided between the Città Alta (Upper City) and the Città Bassa (Lower City), had a population of roughly 117,000 in 2006; the province added approximately 800,000 more.1
The province is distributed across three geographical areas: the mountains in the north, the plains in the south, and a hilly zone in between. The town of Bergamo, where I focused my research, lies right in the middle, and is the commercial, administrative, and social center of the province, as well as its largest urban area. Multiple suburbs, most of which were once small towns in their own right, surround the town, swallowed up by the urban sprawl that characterizes so much of central northern Italy.
Figure 1.1 Map of northern Italy.
I was drawn to Bergamo by its linguistically, culturally, socioeconomically, and politically dynamic situation. I was told by Italians in other places, such as Venice, Bologna, and Milan, that Bergamo had a local dialect, Bergamasco – an ugly, crude-sounding dialect, many of them commented – that was still in use, although it, like all dialects in Italy, was fading in favor of increasing use of Italian. I heard that Bergamaschi, the local people, were rough, uncultured, hard workers whose economic efforts had led them into recent prosperity, although modern values, such as education, had not really caught on there, as Bergamaschi tended to leave school as soon as they could in order to get into the workforce. I was warned that the Northern League, which many Italians regarded as a reactionary and extremist right-wing political party, enjoyed strong support there, and that most Bergamaschi shared the League’s xenophobic views toward Southerners and immigrants. I was told to get ready to eat a lot of polenta, the traditional staple of Bergamasco cuisine.
What I have found in Bergamo, of course, was more complex and variable than the picture painted by outsiders. I heard Bergamasco being spoken in a number of contexts, and although it differs from standard Italian in many ways, it would be wrong to describe it simply as “rough” or “ugly.” I met people who both violated and conformed to the stereotypes I had heard before I got there. Some Bergamaschi I met worked in factories, and had left school at 14, sometimes younger, while others were highly educated. A number owned and ran their own small businesses, specializing in textile or construction materials production, while quite a few were impiegati (clerks or office workers), white-collar workers in the service sector who make up the majority of the modern Italian workforce (Martinelli et al. 1999). I met teachers and engineers, librarians and students, bakers and bankers. Most were friendly and welcoming to me, even while they were telling me about the Bergamasco stereotype of being closed and reserved with strangers. Some Bergamaschi were indeed supporters of the Northern League, and many others thought that certain of the Northern League’s ideas made sense. Many, however, disapproved of much of the League’s platform: secession of the north from Italy (since put aside, at least officially), opposition to immigrants, and at-times xenophobic views on southern Italians. And while polenta was still on the menu of every trattoria, most families ate a wide variety of Italian foods.
I went to Bergamo to undertake a project on language ideology; to study, in other words, the ways in which Bergamaschi viewed and used language – what they thought about Italian and Bergamasco and did to them, as well as how they spoke them. To date, no researcher had undertaken such a project in Northern Italy, and I quickly found that Bergamaschi themselves talked about their sociolinguistic situation in terms of shift and change, and, very often, outright loss, even when they admitted that they themselves spoke their vernacular regularly. They nearly always talked about Bergamasco in relation to Italian, and often not in flattering terms. There were also a number of people who demonstrated their support of the dialect and local ways of living through engaging in various types of cultural production activities, such as writing poetry in the dialect, participating in dialect theater, writing dictionaries in the dialect, or taking classes in how to write it.
At poetry readings and play practices, during interviews and everyday conversations, I often observed Bergamaschi react to and evaluate their own and others’ use of language. This was as true for those who spoke Bergamasco and explicitly valued it, as for those who rarely thought about it and claimed not to speak a word of it. “What a beautiful word,” someone might whisper under their breath to another audience member. Someone else might laugh about a particularly strong accent, while a director might correct an actor’s pronunciation of certain phrases, implicitly reacting to and putting into motion linguistic ideological frames of evaluation. “I hope they didn’t hear my accent,” “my Bergamasco isn’t very good because I only use it to speak to my grandparents,” “that’s not a real Bergamasco word,” “her Italian isn’t really very good,” were all metalinguistic statements I heard in various contexts from diverse speakers: that is, talk about talk. These types of implicit and explicit cues illustrated that for Bergamaschi, as for many people, the form of their language use often mattered as much as the content.2
The Local Social Aesthetics of Language
I consider these Bergamasco linguistic and metalinguistic activities as discursive positionings within an ideological frame in which Bergamasco and Italian were associated with certain types of selves, time periods (past, future, present), activities, and values. Scholarship on the relationship of power and language in particular has recently been considered through the lens of language ideologies, dynamic sets of beliefs about language that are enacted and reproduced in everyday linguistic practice and interaction. Language ideologies are “the cultural conceptions of the nature, form, and purpose of language, and of communicative behavior as an enactment of a collective order” (Gal and Woolard 1995:130), and include large-scale sociohistorical processes that shape and are shaped by language. The study of language ideologies evolved out of linguistic anthropologists’ increasing interest in the points of articulation between language use and political economies and other hierarchical social structures (for overviews, see Gal 1989; Kroskrity 2000; Schieffelin et al. 1998; Woolard 1998). In Bergamo, language ideologies generally coalesced in debates about the roles of Bergamasco and Italian, and reflections on how local speech played an active part in the ways various types of power were distributed, struggled over, contested, and reinforced.
Bergamasco language ideologies drew on, but were not reducible to, social distributions of value that contrasted notions of social solidarity with conceptualizations of status, power, and dominance long familiar to linguistic and cultural anthropologists (see, for example, Brown and Gilman 1972). Analysts have categorized speakers’ affective orientations towards languages according to these two axes of social differentiation, based on the concepts of power or prestige and solidarity or in-group authenticity in order to explore how speakers value their languages. The relative social value of language may be linked to the higher social position of a language’s speakers, indexing socioeconomic advancement, or based on the association of that language with particular literary genres or traditions which are valued as “high” culture with a social group (Dorian 1982; Gal 1979; Morford 1997). Value may also be built on the institutional support a language receives from national, regional, and local forms of government, including efforts to standardize and circulate written forms of the language, ensuring its use in official contexts of use such as schools and government offices, as has been true for Italian (De Mauro 1972; Kramer 1983; Lepschy et al. 1996). Bringing a language such as Bergamasco into a classroom setting, where it has not been used previously, may be a bid to tap into this type of prestige and value.
Alternately, value may be based on speakers’ association of the language with intimate contexts such as in the home or among family or friends. This is what Trudgill (1972) and others have called “covert prestige” or solidarity (Heller 1995; Labov 1966a; Milroy 1987), valuing a language variety precisely because it lacks those other institutional and literary bases for prestige, but is the language of social bonding. Solidarity is often the most important – and sometimes only – form of value attributed to many minority languages like Bergamasco. Dorian’s observation about Scottish Gaelic that “in the case of a strictly local-currency language of low prestige, lacking any institutional support whatever, the home domain is clearly crucial to the continuity of the language” (Dorian 1981:82) highlights the high value placed on the role of solidarity in maintaining a minority language. Bergamasco was, indeed, often described as the language of “confidenza” (social intimacy and emotional connection), the language of friendship and family, so much so that it was rare to hear anyone addressed in anything but its informal forms.3
Stressing such differences between Bergamasco and Italian paints a picture in which the languages were neatly distributed across diverse roles, values, speakers, and appropriate contexts of use. In this way, it is tempting to define Bergamo as a diglossic situation, in which the two languages are hierarchically ranked into a High language (H) of status and a Low language (L) of solidarity (Eckert 1980; Ferguson 1959; Jaffe 1999). Diglossia, however, describes a strict distribution of the H and L languages across speaking contexts, and so cannot fully depict the fluidity with which Italian and Bergamasco were used in most everyday life. In an effort to describe the Italian context more precisely, Berruto has used the term “dilalia,” in which the H language can be appropriately used across all social contexts, while use of the L language is restricted to more informal, intimate contexts (1989, 1994).4 This simple binary of H vs. L, however, still fails to account for the variability of language use across speakers and contexts or the extensive mixing of Italian and Bergamasco that often occurred in everyday conversation. There was a wide range of variation between standard Italian and pure Bergamasco that fell outside of this framework and called for analysis.
A defining characteristic of the Bergamasco sociolinguistic situation in the early 2000s was that it involved multiple languages and multiple language ideologies. In this sense it was what Bakhtin has called “heteroglossic.” Bakhtin recognizes that in essence all language situations involve heteroglossia, “the social diversity of speech types” (1981:263); in talking about Bergamo, the concept is particularly fruitful due to its attention not just to multiplicity, but to the specific local meanings of multiplicity. Bakhtin asserts that “all languages of heteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying them and making each unique, are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values” (1981: 291–292). Different heteroglossic languages are motivated, in other words, by different ideas about the world and language’s place in that world, which exist in dynamic tension with one another.5
As Kathryn Woolard has recently noted, Bakhtin’s conceptions can be difficult to pin down ethnographically (2004). For Bakhtin, heteroglossia is the environment of every instance of language use, such that every utterance resounds with the various histories – or voices – associated with the words involved. Within this environment of heteroglossia, voices animate language varieties, such that using a particular language variety may be tantamount to an expression of a certain “conceptualization of the world in words.” However, Bakhtin posits that voices circulate within a community and are not the property of individuals, making it difficult to apply this concept to real live speakers, especially when, as was true in the Bergamasco situation, linguistic and ideological planes were not so tightly or unequivocally aligned. The continuum of mixed or bivalent language use between Italian and Bergamasco reflected, but was not easily reducible to, a wide array of social meanings.
The concept of indexicality engenders an analysis that captures this variability and tracks the heteroglossic deployment of linguistic varieties and ideologies of language across contexts and speakers.6 Indexicality is the capacity of language to signify non-referentially (referential meaning being the semantic sense of words), through causality or contiguity. As a smoke indexes – or points to – fire, so can language index contextual factors about speakers, settings, attitudes, orientations, stances, etc. Indexicals both presuppose certain features of context, and entail others. When an accent is indexically deployed, for instance, its use presupposes that participants in an interaction recognize the accent and the social values and stereotypes with which it is associated (otherwise it would be meaningless). Such use also reinforces or may act to alter – but, in any event, acts on in some fashion – these values and stereotypes and their links to the accent. Indexes are like delicate anchors that connect the non-referential forms of language and the context, both the immediate micro-context of speakers’ relationships and unfolding histories, and the larger macro-context of politics, economics, and institutional power. Such anchors are never static, but instead are constantly being recast and reset.7
In Bergamo, speaking in a Bergamasco way indexed values such as home, family, and intimacy, but also peasant-ness, lack of education, and backwardness, while speaking Italian pointed to values such as personal refinement, educational achievement, and formality. The fluidity of the heteroglossic deployment of different ways of speaking, however, meant that the indexical potentials of any particular utterance were always multiple. Following Woolard, who argues for analysis that acknowledges “opposed values as simultaneously and equally present in many bilingual phenomena” (1999:6), I foreground instances in which languages and meanings overlapped, as speakers could speak bivalently, drawing simultaneously on the linguistic and symbolic resources of both languages. This possibility of simultaneity ensured that, however starkly the binaries might be described, in practice, divisions or categories were rarely so simple.
The form of language in Bergamo dynamically resonated with multiple voices; orientations towards that form, such as the metalinguistic commentary I mentioned above, were similarly various as well as remarkably common. Pervasive attention to the form or shape of language as well as to its function (what it does or means) indicates the utility of the concept of aesthetics in analyzing the Bergamasco language situation. For Bourdieu in his work on taste and distinction, perceiving aesthetically means attending to form over function (1984). Bourdieu and others (Clifford 1988; Myers 1994, 2002; Shusterman 2000) have demonstrated how culturally specific aesthetic sensibilities are. Indeed, Sharman has argued that culture itself is “an aesthetic system, whereby meaning is produced and reproduced through the attachment of value to experience” (2006:842), while Coote maintains that all “human activity has an aesthetic aspect” (1992:246).
While aesthetics has a long, tangled history of focusing specifically on art and form, I use the term here in a more applied, quotidian sense, coupling it with “social” to emphasize this approach. Brenneis used the concept social aesthetics to describe a process that “fuses intellectual sense-making activity with local aesthetic criteria for coherence and beauty … and with ethnopsychological notions of personhood, emotion, expression and experience” (1987:237). He explored how, in the rural Fijian Indian village of Bhatgaon, local ways of thinking about certain verbal and musical genres and their performance went hand in hand with particular ways of feeling about these practices, which were in turn linked to ideas of the self and others. He emphasized that, “[i]t is indeed very difficult to separate ethnopsychological from aesthetic notions; in articulating the bases of their enjoyment or appreciation of particular events, villagers also articulate their sense of self and experience” (Brenneis 1987:238). Villagers’ ideas about themselves were intimately linked to how they felt about what they aesthetically responded to, such that there was an explicit link between linguistic and musical performance, ideas about these performances, and emotion.
People nearly always feel what they speak, not just during performances in which the right lines must be spoken or the alliteration of a phrase deliciously falls from the lips, but also in making choices about what and how to speak, speakers know when something feels right or wrong, beautiful or ugly. In linguistic anthropology and related fields, focusing on the form and performance of language has often occurred under the auspices of looking at poetics, another non-referential function of language (Banti and Giannattasio 2004; Bauman 1983, 2000, 2004; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Caton 1990). Jakobson (1960) stressed that the poetic function – in which there is a focus on the shape or sound of language – is always present in language, even when it is backgrounded. Here I want to push this observation to the heart of my analysis.
In order to do so, I introduce and explore the concept of the social aesthetics of language. A social aesthetics of language is the interweaving of culturally shaped and emotionally felt dimensions of language use and the extra-linguistic factors that rank people and their groups into hierarchies. The concept of the social aesthetics of language is meant to capture the texture of the discourses, practices, ideologies, sentiments, and socioeconomic and political constraints that produce and inform speaking and living. This texture is produced at the intersection of power and emotion. For many Bergamaschi, for example, feeling attached to Bergamasco and feeling like you should speak Italian to your children balanced the prestige and socioeconomic advantages of Italian with the socially valued privilege of sounding local in certain contexts. One of the central conundrums for those who study and ponder the aesthetic has been to describe the link between person and object; the social aesthetics of language describes how implicit and explicit metalinguistic activity can be analyzed to reveal exactly these links between people and what they speak.
Issues of power are always implicated in aesthetic systems. Wolf, discussing Sufism in Pakistan, has observed that, “the link between poetics and politics is strong” (2006:247), while Eagleton (1990) has stressed the intrinsic connections between aesthetics and power. Bourdieu’s conceptualization of distinction demonstrates that aesthetic systems are hierarchically ranked, implying the presence of differentially distributed socioeconomic power across classes (1984). In France, displaying one’s taste in art, food, and clothing, for example, is an embodied act that situates one within the class hierarchy. Without the necessary education and what Bourdieu calls “social origin,” one cannot simply walk into the Louvre and properly appreciate the art; this is a learned aesthetic activity. Similarly, in Bergamo, enjoyment of Bergamasco cultural productions – such as poetry readings or play performances – the satisfaction found in hearing a well-turned phrase in Bergamasco conversation, even the cringe evoked by a Bergamasco word spoken out of place in an Italian setting, hinged on the hierarchical positioning of Italian as the language of power and Bergamasco as the language of intimacy and confidenza
