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

give you my news that I’m all right so I hope

this letter finds you and the children in good

health. Dear Antonietta I have waited two

other days thinking I would receive your

letter and instead I didn’t see anything and I

was forced to put down these few lines; now

I am letting you know that Sunday Santi. A.

arrived (...)^6

The existence of “parallel schools,” the

mass media first of all, alongside

institutional schools, has hastened the

compression of dialects; today, with regard

to dialect literatures, syntagms such as “lost

words”^7 and “furtive languages”^8 are being

used. Meanwhile, the predictable adoption

of English as future official language of the

European Community could make the

Italian language, due to its limited diffusion,

into a European dialect, while more and