Ciao Bella (Lingua)!

The seductive call of a beautiful language, plus some learning hacks

The tattered cover of a notebook I bought years ago.

“Hello beautiful!” Most people seem to agree that if there were a beauty contest for languages, Italian would win. The question is why, as an Italian friend of mine pointed out in a comment on last week’s post. So I went looking for justification and fell down the research rabbit hole. I’d really like to know what you think, though, so please take my little poll at the end of this post and/or leave a comment about what, in your opinion, makes Italian una lingua bellissima.

Now, on to what I dug up—some perspectives about Italian from a few writers and one language expert. We’ll start with a gushing one, because why not?

Dianne Hales, author of La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World’s Most Enchanting Language (a title that does more than hint at Hales’ enthusiasm), has this to say about the Italian language’s lure: “Italian, handcrafted by poets and wordsmiths, embodies its native speakers’ greatest genius: the ability to transform anything—from marble to melody, from the humble noodle to life itself—into a joyous art. English, like a big, black, felt-nosed Magic Marker, declares itself in bold statements and blunt talk. Italian’s sleek, fine-pointed quill twirls into delicate curlicues and dramatic flourishes. While other tongues do little more than speak, this lyrical language thrills the ear, beguiles the mind, captivates the heart, enraptures the soul, and comes closer to any other idiom to expressing the essence of what it means to be human.”

I’m not sure I agree with her last claim, but I do think the language offers a unique window into Italians’ hearts and minds—in other words, the essence of what it means to be Italian—which is a topic I’ll write about another day.

One of the online Italian language teachers I recommend, Davide Gemello, the young, smart, polyglot-creator of Podcast Italiano, is more down to earth. As a native speaker, he says he can’t judge whether or not Italian is beautiful; furthermore, he says in this podcast episode, claiming Italian is the most beautiful language doesn’t make sense because 1) beauty is subjective, and 2) there are more than 7,000 languages and no one has heard them all. Nevertheless, the idea has been around for a long time. Davide cites French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778), who compared English unfavorably with Italian, saying the latter “has purity and natural elegance.”

Davide also mentions author Thomas Mann, who, in his unfinished 1954 novel Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years, gives these words (in Italian) to his protagonist: “Son veramente innamorato di questa bellissima lingua, la più bella del mondo. […] Per me non c’è dubbio che gli angeli nel cielo parlano italiano.” (“I’m in love with this wonderful language, the most beautiful in the world. […] For me, there is no doubt that the angels in the heavens speak Italian.”)

But wait a minute! Aspetta un attimo! As Davide points out, what many of those writers heard and praised back in the day wasn’t the Italian we learn today; it wasn’t the Italian we swoon over. It was dialect. These days, when we say Italian is beautiful, what we’re talking about is, for the most part, italiano neutro, or standard Italian, the Italian of language professionals and actors and dubbing artists and radio/TV journalists. Not always, though—there are plenty of Italian TV shows that reflect the dialects or regional idiosyncrasies of their settings, like DOC: Nelle Tue Mani (Milano), Nero a Metà (Rome), and Il Commissario Montalbano (Sicily). And many of the TV news reporters reporting from various places certainly sound like locals.

Anyway, if Italian is in fact undeniably beautiful, Davide chalks it up to some particular attributes. (You’ll find this info, and a lot more, in the same Podcast Italiano episode I linked to above.)

1. It’s vowel-rich. As an example, Davide gives us this sentence: “Ma che cos’é che rende l’italiano una lingua foneticamente bella e piacevole alle orecchie di così tante persone?” Mamma mia, 45 vowels in 18 words!

2. Accented vowels are lengthened, contributing to the language’s fluidity. We don’t rush through casa, amore, or amico; we linger. We say caahsa, amohhre, ameeco.

3. The double consonants (Davide says no other principal romance language has them), which are critical both to a word’s meaning and to the language’s musicality. Combined with the lengthened vowels, they create a unique, recognizable rhythm.

4. There are few hard-hitting consecutive consonants, and never more than three.

5. There are no guttural or aspirated sounds (like in Russian and Spanish) or nasal -sounding vowels (like in Portuguese, French, and Polish).

6. The intonation (which varies regionally) is very expressive, with pronounced saliscendi (ups and downs) that create musicality.

In another video, this one about pronunciation, Davide explains two more rhythmic/musical aspects of the Italian language. He’s not addressing the question of language beauty, but I’d add both of these to the above list.

The first concerns sentence emphasis. One word in a sentence carries the primary emphasis, and in that word, native speakers emphasize/elongate the vowel of the accented syllable (so yeah, an accented vowel in the accented syllable of an accented word). We can see how that works by looking at one sentence—domani torno a casa—and changing the accented word. So if you want to emphasize that what you’re doing tomorrow is returning home (yay! finally!), you’d say, “Domani torno a cAsa.” (The first “a” in “casa” is accented and elongated.) If, however, you want to emphasize the fact of your return, you’d say, “Domani tOrno a casa.” But if the most important takeaway is that your return happens not today, not in three or four days, but tomorrow, you’d say, “DomAni torno a casa.”

Similarly, with closed syllables (ones that end in a consonant), you elongate the consonant in the accented word. So you’d say “veNNti,” or “venti voLLte,” or “venti volte al gioRRno.”

N.B. (which you probably know stands for the Latin nota bene, or note well): Davide would really really really like you not to exaggerate this sentence emphasis too much because he really really really doesn’t want you to sound like Super Mario.

The second pronunciation hack that contributes to the language’s delicious musicality—and will have you sounding more Italian in no time—is the elision of ending and beginning vowels in consecutive words. Instead of giving each vowel equal time, we smush ’em together. So instead of “Sono andata al mare” with every vowel voiced clearly, you’d say, “SOnowanDAtal mare.” Instead of “Lo faccio entro domani,” you’d say, “Lo FAccioWEntro domani.” And though you can say “Dieci anni” if you like, you could also say “Diec’anni.”

Since we’re talking about language hacks, let’s deviate for a moment from the question of beauty and talk about a few of my own language-learning hacks. (These are off the top of my head, but if this topic interests you, I’ll do another post later. Let me know in the comments.)

• Learn basic grammar terms, because Italian language textbooks and teachers use them. If you don’t know what a direct vs indirect object is, for example, or a participle, or a preposition, as a language learner you’re facing an extra layer of confusion.

• Remember that a lot of nouns ending in “ma” are masculine. So yes, problema, programma, sistema, cardiogramma, and so on take the article “il” in the singular. That said, there are also feminine nouns ending in “ma,” like mamma, fiamma, lacrima. How do you know the difference? The masculine nouns are those that derive from the Greek, if that’s any help; otherwise, memorize, memorize, memorize. (Sorry.)

• The pronunciation of a single “s” depends on what surrounds it. When it falls between two vowels, it’s pronounced like an American “z” (so rosa is pronounced “roza,” for example). The same is true when an “s” precedes a “v” at the beginning of a word: svolta, svolgere, sviluppere. In other cases, the “s” is pronounced like a normal “s”: sapere, solo, verso, forse, sfoglia, smettere, stamattina. A double “s” is always pronounced like an “s,” but elongated: permesso, rossa, addossarsi, ingresso.

• Collect idiomatic phrases, because you’ll hear them all the time in casual conversations. For example, when people want to know how you like it here (wherever you are), they’ll ask, “Come si trova?” When friends ask if you want to do something, they’ll say, “Ti va?” “Quanto costa?” is a perfectly fine way to ask how much something costs, but you might also hear “Quanto va/viene quel libro?” or “Quanto vanno/vengono le mele?” And the often-heard phrase“Ci mancherebbe” has three possible uses—as a synonym for prego, when you want to suggest it would be impossible not to have done what you’re being thanked for; as a synonym for “obviously; it goes without saying”; and ironically, to mean “as if things weren’t bad enough.” You’ll find lots of great videos on idioms on Learn Italian with Lucrezia, including this one.

• We all encounter pesky words and phrases that don’t seem to stick in our heads no matter what we do. Or maybe you just want to broaden your vocabulary. My hack for this is to choose one word or phrase and make a real effort to use it, whether in a conversation or for a day, for a week, whatever. For example, I tend to always use “niente” to mean “you’re welcome” in an informal exchange, so I’m focusing on saying “figurati” instead.

Okay, let’s get back to this question of la lingua più bella nel mondo. For some people, beauty alone might be reason enough to learn Italian. Not so for author Jhumpa Lahiri, a name familiar to many Italian language learners because of her book In Altre Parole (In Other Words). In the book, which she wrote in Italian even though it’s not her native tongue, she describes what compelled her to learn the language: “It’s beautiful, certainly, but beauty doesn’t enter into it. It seems like a language with which I have to have a relationship. It’s like a person met one day by chance, with whom I immediately feel a connection, of whom I feel fond. As if I had known it for years, even though there is still everything to discover. I would be unsatisfied, incomplete, if I didn’t learn it.”

Now, on to the promised poll.

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Books of the week:

• In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri (I recommend the edition with both Italian and English.)

• Italian Verbs by Maria Morris (1994, Teach Yourself series, ed. Paul Coggle. Sorry about the link to Amazon in Italy, but the U.S. site doesn’t have the same edition. A very useful book!)

• 501 Italian Verbs (part of Barron’s 501 Verbs series) by John Colaneri, Vincent Luciani, and Marcel Danesi (indispensable!)

• Le prime 3000 parole italiane by Roberto Tartaglione (great for building vocabulary)