Dialect Poetry of Southern Italy (Italian Poetry in Translation Book 2)

he writes about the language “stolen” from a

people:

And in the whole world around me,

dialect seemed destined to become

extinguished in epochs so distant as to

appear abstract. It seemed that the

italianization of Italy had to be founded on a

wide contribution from below, dialectal and

popular in nature (and not on the

substitution of the pilot literary language

with the managerial pilot language, as later

happened). Among the other tragedies we

have experienced (...) in the last few years,

there has also been the tragedy of the loss of

dialect (...)^3

And while the phenomenon of

(functional) illiteracy continues to decrease

in the island, with extremes of 24.56% in the

1951 census and 16.46% in 1961 (which leave

the region in fourteenth place among the