Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre

2. Dialect Theatre: The Case of Italy

2 Dialect Theatre: The Case of Italy Dialects, like foreign languages, except normally in a less extreme form, provide a potential disruption of the normal assumption that a theatre will utilize the same language as its surrounding culture. Thus dialect in the theatre can offer another aspect of heteroglossic production . By way of introducing the concept of dialogue I will again quote Crystal’s standard work, the Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics . The entry on dialect begins: A regionally or socially distinctive variety of language, identi‹ed by a particular set of words and grammatical structures. Spoken dialects are usually also associated with a distinctive pronunciation, or accent. Any language with a reasonably large number of speakers will develop dialects, especially if there are geographical barriers separating groups of people from each other, or if there are divisions of social class. One dialect may predominate as the of‹cial or standard form of the language, and this is the variety which may come to be written down. The distinction between “dialect” and “language” seems obvious : dialects are subdivisions of languages.1 A number of elements in this de‹nition deserve special attention. First, while it is clearly true that established languages will inevitably develop dialects, this dynamic must be balanced by the following statement, which is often given less attention. Dialects do not only evolve as offshoots of an of‹cial “language”; any such language itself began as a dialect. A variety of social forces, cultural, economic, and geographical, determined which of a variety of competing dialects would become recognized as a “language.” The less successful dialects are then necessarily relegated to inferior positions in the cultural hierarchy, which of course 62 includes their use in the theatre. This same dynamic continues to operate as the inevitable new dialects appear, encouraged, as Crystal notes, by both “geographical barriers” and “divisions of social class.” This of course has meant that in addition to dialects being generally somewhat looked down upon by speakers of the “of‹cial” language, dialect speakers have often suffered the additional stigma of being marked by their speech as coming from a subordinate or inferior geographical area or social class. It is generally assumed that speakers of different dialects of the same language can basically understand each other, although this is in fact much more true of the written forms of the dialects than their spoken forms, which is of course the primary concern of the theatre. Almost any language with a substantial number of dialects—English, French, German , Italian, Arabic, Chinese, to mention only some of the most obvious examples—possess many dialects that are essentially unintelligible to each other, especially in their spoken form. What really distinguishes a dialect from a language is less a matter of intelligibility or any particular features it possesses, than the matter of whether it has established a kind of recognized cultural sovereignty over a body of speakers. Italian, Spanish, and French were once dialects of Latin, but have now become established as independent languages with dialects of their own. The necessary subservient or derived status of the dialect means that the heteroglossia it may introduce to the theatre is among its most important features. Types of Dialect Theatre Normally when the term dialect theatre is used, the reference is to a theatre created for a particular dialect community, and plays in this tradition will normally utilize that dialect throughout. In this they are parallel to plays written in standard and conventional languages such as French, English, or Italian, and the language itself is not normally a central concern of the play (except of course for its importance in grounding the play ‹rmly in the community of its audience). Once one dialect emerges as the “standard” dialect, and eventually the of‹cial national “language” (Castilian in Spain, Tuscan in Italy, the dialect of the Paris region in France, East Midland in England), the rival dialects that sur63 Dialect Theatre vive are increasingly relegated to subservient and marginalized positions , their speakers provided with less and less of what Bourdieu calls “linguistic capital” for trade outside the narrow con‹nes of their dialect community. The tension-‹lled power relationship between the “of‹cial” language and its weaker rivals can then provide the grounding for the most common use of dialect in the theatre, the dialect character or characters, whose utilization invariably evokes this unequal power relationship. In plays created by and...