Neapolitan language

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Neapolitan
napulitano
Native to	Italy
Region	Abruzzo Apulia Basilicata Calabria Campania Lazio Marche Molise
Ethnicity	Mezzogiorno Italians
Native speakers	around 7.5 million (2025)
Language family	Indo-European Italic Latino-Faliscan Latinic Romance Italo-Western Italo-Dalmatian Italo-Romance Intermediate Southern Italian Neapolitan
Dialects	Arianese Barese Benevento Irpinian Molisan Southern Latian Tarantino Vastese Cosentian
Language codes
ISO 639-2	nap
ISO 639-3	nap
Glottolog	neap1235  Continental Southern Italian sout3126  South Lucanian = (Vd) Lausberg
Southern Italo-Romance languages
Neapolitan as part of the European Romance languages[image reference needed]

Neapolitan (autonym: 'o nnapulitano [o nːapuliˈtɑːnə]; Italian: napoletano) is a Romance language of the Southern Italo-Romance group spoken in most of continental Southern Italy. It is named after the Kingdom of Naples, which once covered almost the entirety of the area. On 14 October 2008, a law by the Region of Campania acknowledged that Neapolitan was to be protected.^[1]

While the language group is native to much of continental Southern Italy or the former Kingdom of Naples, the terms Neapolitan, napulitano or napoletano may instead refer to the specific variety natively spoken in Naples and the immediately surrounding Naples metropolitan area and Campania region. The present article mostly deals with this variety, which enjoys a certain degree of prestige and has historically wide written attestations.^[2][3]

Neapolitan is a Romance language that is classified as belonging to the Intermediate Southern Italian group of Italo-Romance. There are considerable differences among the various dialects, but they often show high levels of mutual intellegibility. Mutual intellegibility with different branches altogether can instead be more problematic, depending on individual exposure and linguistic factors.

More specifically, closeness to Italian, linguistically part of Tuscan, is still somewhat sharp. There are notable grammatical differences, such as Neapolitan showing an uncountable class of its own, or Italian having a richer system of conjugation for its verbs, together with complex historical phonological developments, which often obscure the cognacy of lexical items, but cross-communication can usually happen without much difficulty.

Its evolution has been similar to that of Italian and other Romance languages from their shared origin in Vulgar Latin, but in addition to this base, it clearly reflects other influxes, both by later superstrata and previous substrata, such as the Oscan language. One possibly inherited feature from Oscan might be the rhotacism of /d/ into /r/ at the beginning of a word or in between vowels: e.g. Neapolitan diece (Italian dieci, meaning "ten") is pronounced and often spelled as riece; Neapolitan pede (Italian piede, meaning "foot") is likewise pronounced and often spelled pere. Another supposedly inherited feature might be the assimilation of voiced stops into the preceding nasals that Oscan showed whenever such consonant clusters occurred: e.g. [nd] turning into [nː] as in Neapolitan onna (Italian onda, meaning "wave"); [mb] turning into [mː] as in Neapolitan chiummo (Italian piombo, meaning "lead"), both of which are much more consistently reflected in spelling. Other effects of the Oscan substratum on modern Neapolitan are postulated, but these claims are highly controversial among scholars.

Neapolitan also has a significant superstratum that consists of all the influences by other Romance languages (Aragonese, Catalan, Occitan and Franco-Provençal above all), but also by the Germanic languages, and especially by the Greek language. Because of the prestige that standard Italian started to have throughout the Italian peninsula already from the 12th to 13th centuries, Neapolitan never had a true chance to be fully standardized, and as a result there exist terms in Neapolitan showing multiple forms, such as the word for tree which can take four different spellings: arbero, arvero, arbolo, arvolo.

Neapolitan has enjoyed a rich literary, theatrical, cinematographic, and also musical history (notably Giambattista Basile, Eduardo Scarpetta, Eduardo De Filippo, Salvatore Di Giacomo Ferdinando Russo and Totò). Thanks to this important heritage, together with the work of artists like Renato Carosone in the 1950s, and Pino Daniele from the 1970s and 1980s onwards, Neapolitan is still widely in use today for popular music not only around the area of Naples, but it has increasingly gained acceptance even at the national scale.

The language has no official status within Italy and it is not taught in schools. The University of Naples Federico II offers (from 2003) courses in Campanian Dialectology at the faculty of Sociology, whose aim is not to teach students the language, but to study its history, usage, literature and social role. There are also ongoing legislative attempts to have it listed as an official minority language of Italy, but it is currently just a recognized ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee language with the ISO 639-3 language code of nap.

Here is an IPA pronunciation table of Neapolitan as spoken in the city of Naples:

Neapolitan orthography consists of 22 Latin letters. Much like what happens for Italian, it does not contain k/w/x/y, although these letters might be found in foreign words. Yet unlike Italian, it does employ j, which overall reflects a higher incidence of this sound. The following English pronunciation guidelines are based on General American pronunciation, and the values used may not apply to other dialects. (See also: International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects.)

All Romance languages are closely related. Although Neapolitan varieties share a high degree of their vocabulary with standard Italian, the official language of Italy, several differences in pronunciation can make the connection almost unrecognizable: one of such distinguishing features is undoubtably the Neapolitan weakening of unstressed vowels into schwa (the sound that a takes in about). Nonetheless, the majority of Neapolitan speakers is used to speak the proscribed national language for communication, even if they very often pronounce standard Italian with a distinctive local accent: for example, another typical characteristic which is more consistently transferred from Neapolitan into Italian is the palatalization of [s] (like the s in sip) into [ʃ] (like the sh in ship), which occurs whenever /s/ occurs in an initial position followed by a consonant (yet the set of consonants triggering this phonological shift changes from dialect to dialect).

The grammar is what mostly sets Neapolitan apart from Italian. For instance, the gender and number of a word are expressed through a system of metaphony in the stressed vowel, since the final vowels in the suffix are no longer distinguished (e.g. Neapolitan luongo [ˈlwoŋːə], longa [ˈlɔŋːə]; Italian lungo, lunga; masc. "long", fem. "long"; Neapolitan franzese [franˈdzeːsə], franzise [franˈdziːsə]; Italian francese, francesi; sing. "French", pl. "French").

Neapolitan seems to have had a significant influence on the intonation of Rioplatense Spanish, which is spoken in a major portion of Argentina, in addition to the entire country of Uruguay, but also on that of the Paulistano dialect from in and around the area of São Paulo in Brazil, even though such varieties received substantial influxes from other regional Italian languages as well.

While there are only five graphic vowels in Neapolitan, phonemically, there are eight. Stressed vowels e and o can be either "closed" or "open" and the pronunciation is different for the two. The grave accent (à, è, ò) is used to denote open vowels, and the acute accent (é, í, ó, ú) is used to denote closed vowels, with alternative ì and ù. However, accent marks are not commonly used in the actual spelling of words except when they occur on the final syllable of a word, such as Totò, arrivà, or pecché, and when they appear here in other positions, it is only to demonstrate where the stress, or accent, falls in some words. Also, the circumflex is used to mark a long vowel where it would not normally occur (e.g. sî "you are").

^{[citation needed]}

The following clusters are always geminated if vowel-following.

Before a word beginning with a consonant:

C: indicates that the initial consonant of the following word is geminated if followed by a vowel. The reason why they are traditionally spelled with a preceding apostrophe ' is to indicate the elision of the initial sound /l/. All these definite articles are always pronounced distinctly.

The definite article becomes ll' before a word beginning with a vowel, which is invariable for all genders, and for all numbers.

In general, because of the systemic vowels' reduction process, which doesn't allow for an immediate words' gender identification, the tendency in Neapolitan is to specify articles before nouns even in isolation, at least more frequently than what happens in Italian, and more similarly to what happens for instance in French.

For all genders and all positions

These articles can be practically regarded as contracted forms deriving from the numerical pronouns meaning "one", which are uno/una/un', with elision of u in the unstressed initial position. Such development ultimately explains why in these articles, although it always happens to precede either o or a or the following initial vowel, n never undergoes gemination even after words triggering it, as in dimane è n'ato juorno instead of dimane è *nn'ato juorno ("tomorrow is another day").

Neapolitan verbs shows four finite moods: indicative, imperative, conditional and subjunctive, the last of which has near completely died out (at least in the speech of Naples), and three non-finite modes: infinitive, gerund and participle. Each mood exhibits an active voice and a passive voice. Only èssere (Eng. "to be", It. essere) can function as an auxiliary verb for both voices. On the contrary, (h)avé (Eng. "to have", It. avere) can only be employed in the active form, whereas venì (Eng. "to come", It. venire) only in the passive one.

Thus, if the verb is transitive and can hence be conjugated in both the active and passive, then (h)avé will be used for the former and èssere/venì will be interchangeably used for the latter, while if the verb is intransitive and can hence be conjugated just in the active, then (h)avé/èssere will be interchangeably used for it.

Neapolitan

I have brought you to the hospital.

Neapolitan

I was brought home.

Neapolitan

Yesterday I went to Caserta.

In Neapolitan, the initial consonant of a word, which would normally be pronounced as a singleton sound, can sometimes be doubled as well. This process is referred to as syntactic gemination. It more broadly occurs across all Italo-Romance groups and even in the unrelated Finnish language.

Gemination is triggered only by a specific set of words, mainly evolving from Latin monosyllabic parts of speech, as well as from the Proto-Romance derivatives constructed from them, ultimately ending in a consonant sound, which would later be dropped after causing fortition of the following initial consonant (e.g. tre (g)guagliune, "three boys", with Neap. tre being inherited from Lat. TRĒScode: lat promoted to code: la ). Gemination is instead blocked when a pausa occurs right after the trigger word (e.g. datimmenne tre, guagliù!, "give me three of them, boys!", with guagliù being apocopated for guagliune). In case the following terms begin in consonant clusters, the phenomenon only occurs if they happen to be sequences of an obstruent and a liquid consonant (e.g. tre (c)crape, "three goats"), while it doesn't if they instead show any other consonant combination (e.g. tre spate, "three swords").

This gemination happens at the phonological level in pronunciation, but the doubling of consonants is not always reflected in spelling; many Neapolitan editions still mark such syntactic gemination in writing however, resulting in many terms spelled with initial double consonants: the expression meaning "I am crazy" may therefore be spelled either je so' pazzo, or alternatively je so' ppazzo (regardless of its spelling, pronunciation always exhibits syntactic gemination). In both Italian and Finnish, syntactic gemination is never reflected in the standard orthography.

• The conjunctions e and nè but not o (e.g. pane e (c)caso; nè (p)pane nè (c)caso; but pane o caso)
• The prepositions a, pe/pi, co/cu (e.g. a (m)me; pe (t)te; co (v)vuje)
• The negation no/nu, short for non/nun (e.g. no ddìcere niente!)
• The indefinites ogne, cocche (e.g. ogne (c)cosa; cocche (v)vota)
• Interrogative che and relative che but not ca (e.g. che (p)piense? che (f)femmena! che (c)capa!)
• tre (e.g. tre (c)criature)
• accussí (e.g. accussí (b)buono)
• chiú (e.g. chiú (g)grossa)
• From the verb "essere", so'; sî; è but not songo (e.g. je so' (p)pazzo; tu sî (f)frate a isso; chella è (m)maritata; chille so' (t)tutte cafune but chille songo tutte cafune)
• The masculine uncountable definite article 'o (e.g. 'o (c)caso)
• The masculine uncountable pronoun 'o (e.g. 'o (t)tiene 'o (p)pane?)
• The feminine plural definite article 'e (e.g. 'e (m)mane)
• The feminine plural pronoun 'e (e.g. 'e (t)tazze 'e (r)rinchie tu?)
• Demonstrative adjectives chisto and chillo whenever they refer to uncountable nouns in indefinite quantities (e.g. chisto (c)caso; chillo (p)pane)
• The locative lloco (e.g. lloco (s)sotta)
• From the verb stà: sto' (e.g. sto' (p)parlanno)
• Special case Spiritu (S)Santo

• Languages of Italy
• Vulgar Latin
• Oscan language
• Sicilian language
• Central Italian

• Iandolo, Carlo (2001). A lengua 'e Pulecenella: Grammatica napoletana (in Italian). Sorrento: Franco Di Mauro. ISBN 978-8885263710.
• De Blasi, Nicola; Imperatore, Luigi (2001). Il napoletano parlato e scritto: Con note di grammatica storica [Written and Spoken Neapolitan: With Notes on Historic Grammar] (in Italian) (2nd ed.). Napoli: Dante & Descartes. ISBN 978-8888142050.
• Del Vecchio, Emilano (3 July 2014). "Neapolitan: A Great Cultural Heritage". TermCoord.
• Verde, Massimiliano (17 June 2017). "Consegnato il primo Certificato Europeo di Lingua Napoletana" [Granted the first European Certificate of the Neapolitan language]. NapoliToday (in Italian). First Course of Neapolitan Language according to the QCER CEFR with the Patronage of City of Naples realized by Dr.Massimiliano Verde "Corso di Lingua e Cultura Napoletana" with a document of study in Neapolitan Language by Dr.Verde

First public document in Neapolitan Language of the XXI century according to a text of Dr.Verde; the touristic Map of the III Municipality of Naples in Neapolitan Language:

• Palmieri, Paola (22 June 2017). "Napoli per turisti: arriva la prima mappa con info in napoletano e italiano!" [Naples for tourists: Released the first map with text in Neapolitan and Italian!]. Grandenapoli (in Italian).
• "A Napoli nasce la prima mappa turistica con info in italiano e napoletano". Vesuvio Live (in Italian). 21 June 2017.

• Neapolitan recognized by UNESCO (in Italian)
• Websters Online Dictionary Neapolitan–English
• Interactive Map of languages in Italy
• Neapolitan on-line radio station
• Neapolitan glossary on Wiktionary
• Italian-Neapolitan searchable online dictionary
• Neapolitan basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
• Grammar primer and extensive vocabulary for the Neapolitan dialect of Torre del Greco
• Neapolitan language and culture (in Italian)
• Prosodic detail in Neapolitan Italian by Francesco Cangemi. Berlin: Language Science Press. pp. 187 Free download.
• Consegnato il primo Certificato Europeo di Lingua Napoletana (in Italian)
• Salvatore Argenziano. Il Dialetto Napoletano- Appunti di Grafia e Grammatica (in Italian)