“As long as the performer is a native Italian then we’re all set”
This is a seemingly correct statement that I have heard many times in the localization world. And it should absolutely make sense, should it not? That is what you might think if you are not Italian and you don’t have a specific knowledge of the language and its use. However a closer look at any linguistic map of the actual use of modern day Italian and the myriad of its dialects and inflexions, would prove that statement to be fundamentally wrong. Italian is a neo-latin romance language that directly evolved from Latin, however its use was only officialised after the unity of the state which was only reached in 1861. Upon the unification the reality was that a multitude of languages (some would say dialects but renowned linguist John McWorther would spank my hand if he were to read this) were spoken throughout Italy. The vast majority of these languages or dialects evolved independently from Latin creating new neo-Latin languages, with the result that people from different regions could not entirely understand each other. An increasingly standardised Italian spawned from 14th century Florentine, with outstanding writers such as Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarca (alongside with the Sicilian school) setting the bar for a language that could be applied and used at least in writing.
Fast forward all this to the birth of media as we know it today. Imagine having speakers, presenters, newscasters speaking a language that wasn’t particularly uniform. A renewed interest for orthoepy (the study of the pronunciation of a language) and diction soon followed driven by the necessity of creating an artificial yet neutral approach to the spoken italian, that was primarily based on spoken Florentine. Important authors and linguists were employed by RAI to set the way to create this new approach to language. What does this all really mean? For example in Italian there are five vowels (A, E, I, O, U) but ortography doesn’t indicate how to pronounce them specifically in a word, (wheter for example the word pesca (peach) should be pronounced pésca with a closed sounding e or pèsca with an open sounding e). And the issues do not stop here but concern the sound of letters like the S, the Z, and further on.What a mess! Or rather, what a beauty! Luckily linguists could rely largely upon the original Latin from which the current Italian word developed to model the correct pronunciation of words. That is why, in essence, it is not nearly enough to be a mother-tongue performer born and raised in Italy but it is also fundamental for the artists to have studied dizione during their education. This is of cardinal importance as we, as italians, have an almost innate ability to detect with pinpoint accuracy where a person is from within Italy, generally getting right the region of origin, and oftentimes the province or even the specific city! The go-to dictionary for the correct dizione is the D.O.P. (Dizionario d’ortografia e pronunzia) which was first published by ERI (Rai’s publishing branch) back in 1969 and that has been tweaked regularly in subsequent issues. Allow me for a little caveat: regional accents and dialects do have a great importance and are sometimes the required objective; just make sure that it really is what you’re striving for in the content that you wish to deliver to your client.
To sum it up: remember to give voice to the right voice!
Written by: Mattia Fioravanti
