Emilian is a group of closely related dialects of Emilian-Romagnol language spoken in the historical region of Emilia, the western portion of today's Emilia-Romagna region in Northern Italy. There is no standardised version of Emilian. The default word order is subject–verb–object. There are two genders as well as a distinction between plural and singular. Emilian has a strong T–V distinction to distinguish varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity or insult. Its alphabet uses a considerable number of diacritics.
Classification
Emilian is a dialect of the Emilian-Romagnol language, one of unstandardized Gallo-Italic languages. The Emilian dialects naturally form a natural dialect continuum with the bordering Romagnol varieties, while the more distant dialects might be less mutually intelligible. Besides Emilian-Romagnol, the Gallo-Italic family includes Piedmontese, Ligurian and Lombard, all of which maintain a level of mutual intelligiblity with Emilian-Romagnol, which is further influenced by Standard Italian.
Dialects
recognises the following dialects:
Mantovano, spoken in all but the very north of the Province of Mantua in Lombardy. It has a strong Lombard influence.
Vogherese , spoken in the Province of Pavia in Lombardy. It is closely related phonetically and morphologically to Piacentino. It is also akin to Tortonese.
Reggiano, spoken in the Province of Reggio Emilia, although the northern parts of the province are not part of this group and closer to Mantovano.
Modenese, spoken in the Province of Modena, although Bolognese is more widespread in the Castelfranco area. In the northern part of the province of Modena, the lowlands around the town of Mirandola, a Mirandolese sub-dialect of Modenese is spoken.
Carrarese and Lunigiano dialects, spoken in Carrara, Lunigiana, in almost all of the Province of Massa and Carrara in northwestern Tuscany, and a good portion of the Province of La Spezia in eastern Liguria. Historically, this region has been part of Tuscany and the duchies of Modena and Parma at different times, so it has a close economic relationship with the Emilian area and is geographically proximate due to the Magra and Vara rivers.
Rounded front vowel sounds /,, / and a mid-central vowel sound // are mainly common in the Piacentino and western dialects.
In the Piacentino dialect, five vowel sounds being followed by //, are then recognized as nasalized, unless // occurs between two vowel sounds.
Vowel length is also distinguished for the following vowels.
Writing system
Emilian is written using a Latin script that has never been standardised. As a result, spelling varies widely across the dialects. The dialects were largely oral and rarely written until some the late 20th century; a number of written media in Emilian-Romagnol have been made since World War II.
