Milan’s beloved but endangered dialect

By A.V.

THE 2015 World's Fair, held in Milan, was an unexpected success. It showcased a sleek, self-confident city, all trendy architecture and eco-friendly design. How things have changed. In the 1960s, Milan was a grubby, electrifying place. Industry choked the streets, and petty crime was rife. Milan was also different linguistically. Singers belted out folk songs in milanes, the city's distinctive dialect. This tradition is all but dead now. But recalling it conjures another Milan, charting its transformation into a modern city.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Milanese folk music was hugely popular. From legendary joints like the Derby Club, singers like Enzo Jannacci (pictured) and Nanni Svampa composed or reinterpreted dozens of songs covering all parts of Milanese life. Some bands, like I Gufi (The Owls), were famous enough to be shown on television. These chroniclers had a lot of material to work with. The post-war “economic miracle” was turning Milanese society on its head. Hundreds of thousands of poor southerners came north to work in new Milanese factories. Cheap apartment blocks sprouted up to house them. Class tensions were common: one industrial suburb was known as the Italian Stalingrad. In one song, Mr Svampa remarked that he would never stop being jealous of those who can afford to “marry for love”.

It is unsurprising that some resorted to crime. Jannacci (who died in 2013) and Mr Svampa sang at length about la mala, the now defunct Milanese underworld. Friends are betrayed and lives wasted, all for the price of a risotto and a carafe of wine. In one poignant song, the protagonist—now in jail—muses that everyone has “three things at the depth of their heart: their youth, their mother and their first love”. Now that his youth is spent, and his mother dead, the narrator concludes that he’s “stuck like a pirla (prick) with his first love”.

This dry cynicism is typical of the genre. Mr Svampa used it most elegantly when gently mocking the peculiarities of post-war Milanese life. One song skewered the pretentions of middle class women who sit around drinking tea. Another detailed the excitement of a family on a holiday road trip. The Fiat 500, like the Morris Minor in Britain, allowed Italians to explore their country independently for the first time.

If these songs are a fascinating historical record of a changing city, they are also important linguistically. Svampa and his colleagues sang in Milan’s nasal dialect. Its mixed-up vocabulary is a reminder of how recently Italy was a jumble of independent states with connections to different neighbours. French terms like coeur (heart) and oeuf (egg) are just two examples. Indeed, the prevalence of the French oeu and ch sounds can make Milanese seem more Parisian than Italian. Its peculiar negation, using minga instead of non, also distinguishes Milanese from regular Italian.

Indeed, Milanese can often be a struggle just to understand for someone from Naples or Rome. A typical song, “El ridicol matrimoni”, lists the huge quantities of food eaten by a bride before her wedding night:

Trii padéj de risòtt giald
quatter mastèj de lasàgn cald
ses cavagn fra uga e pêr
e quatter navasc de caffè ner.

Compared to this, almost every word is spelt and pronounced differently in Italian:

Tre padelle di risotto giallo
quattro mastelli di lasagna calda
sei cesti di uva e pere
e quattro fiaschi di caffè nero.

In English, the feast included

Three pans of saffron risotto
four trays of hot lasagna
six baskets of grapes and pears
and four large jugs of black coffee.

Nowadays, terms like navasc are dying out. Only about 2% of Milanese still speak the dialect fluently. Ironically, the upheavals of the “economic miracle”—which provided so much inspiration for Svampa and Jannacci—ultimately doomed their dialect. Now that Milan is a thoroughly multicultural city, with immigrants from all over Italy and beyond, it makes sense to just speak Italian. “There are people born in Milan, but who perhaps don’t feel Milanese because they have parents from Puglia or Campania,” says Edoardo Bossi, a Milanese dialect teacher. This is in contrast to parts of Italy that have attracted fewer outsiders, where dialect is still dominant: Sicilian, for example, is spoken by 4.7m people throughout southern Italy. Moreover, young people are shy to speak milanes. The dialect’s gruff reputation hardly helps. According to Mr Bossi, “when you speak Milanese in public, people look at you as if you’re being rude.”

Still, there are some attempts to save it. In September, the city organised Milan’s first “Dialect Day”, where locals were encouraged to try their hand at ordering a coffee and chatting with friends in dialect. I Legnanesi, a theatre troupe that performs in Milanese, is still popular. And while Nanni Svampa may have gone out fashion, bands like Ul Mik Longobardeath have taken up singing in Milanese with gusto—though they have swapped gentle guitar chords for thrash metal.

Although milanes is no longer common as a spoken dialect, its influence still permeates Milanese life. O mia bella Madunina, a song celebrating the golden statue of the Virgin Mary on top of the cathedral, is still Milan’s unofficial anthem. And because Mr Svampa and Jannacci sang about the bawdy lives of normal Milanesi, their themes will always be relevant. Italians will always despair at incompetent bureaucrats. Old Milanese men will always stare after pretty girls—and the girls will always turn and call them a pirla in return.