The German Dialect of the Alpine Inhabitants of South Tyrol and the Seven Communities

Appendix.

Statistics.

On the German Alpine inhabitants of South Tyrol and the adjacent Venetian territory. (Continuation.) 2/7

II. Dialect.

The strange observation must first be made that in all the aforementioned localities, pastoral care and school, where such exists, are conducted in the Italian language. Hence it comes that these communities have a dual language, as whole Italy had for a long time when the Latin language gradually faded away and the present Italian language formed from its corruption, which was the vernacular for several centuries and is therefore still called the common tongue, while in the churches Latin was still preached to the people and public proceedings took place in the Latin language. Thus, these Alpine inhabitants also have their common language, which is German, and the cultivated language, namely Italian, though with the difference that, just as in Italy the Italian language arose from Latin, the latter ceased to exist to the degree that the former was refined, or rather one merged with the other, so on the contrary the two languages of these people have maintained themselves unmixed at the same time, aiming at no mixture whatever owing to their lack of relationship.

Meanwhile, German is exclusively the national language, and since only this is spoken in families, the children do not understand Italian, and only begin to learn it when they attend catechism in church and school; which causes unspeakable difficulty to the pastors and teachers, and hinders popular education to the highest degree.

The women, who rarely leave their place of residence, understand Italian, but speak it only with difficulty. The men, who frequently must travel to other regions on account of their business and trade, speak Italian fluently, but with a German accent. The sound of their voice is a harsh shout, which comes from having to drown out the noise of their torrents to make themselves understood from house to house, and also from field to field and in the woods. The inhabitants of the Seven Communities in the territory of Vicenza and their neighbors, the people of Lavarone, have something peculiar in this, that they seem to speak constantly in an interrogative tone, raising the last syllable by four tones in every sentence.

The learned and famous Bishop of Padua, Monsignor Dondi, who passed away last year and under whose diocese the seven Venetian communities fall, had the small catechism prescribed in the former Kingdom of Italy translated into their German dialect to provide the children there with a preliminary notion of Christian instruction, and printed it in the printing house of his seminary in 1813 under the title: »Der kloane Catechismo«.

From this catechism, as well as from the attached letter No. 1, one can form an idea of their language. Some words are Italian, especially those which the people do not use in their social intercourse, but learn in church or school. The rest is a German, though crude, dialect, with few grammatical inflectional cases and gradations, which however, setting aside certain errors in pronunciation to which the translator of the catechism voluntarily bound himself, is in the main a German more or less different from that spoken by the mountain inhabitants of North Tyrol. The language of the other Alpine inhabitants of whom we treat almost coincides with this language.

That of the mountain inhabitants of Roncegno and Pergine approaches even closer to that of the northern Tyrolean mountaineers. It should be noted, however, that the northern Tyroleans, favored by schools, zealous pastors, and their constant commerce with neighboring towns and markets, being more educated and possessing the advantage of having only a single language, have slightly refined their dialect and broken the habit of some cruder phrases, so much so that within living memory many idiotisms of the first kind have fallen out of use among them, and many new, more refined expressions have been adopted instead. But the Tyrolean Alpine inhabitants on the southern borders, isolated since ancient times, who speak their language constantly only among themselves and never hear it from others, never had any of those means to cleanse it of crude expressions; it is still the same as it was centuries ago, with the exception of the Italian words which, out of unfamiliarity with equivalent German expressions, they wove into their language. They therefore still retain certain expressions that in Germany have either fallen entirely out of use or assumed a contemptuous meaning, e.g. klafen (to speak), Pfaff (priest), er hat krit (he said), Floas (meat). Otherwise, the expressions they use, e.g. hoach (high), roat (red), Moaster (master), Goas (goat), Pfoad (shirt), groas (large) and similar are purely Tyrolean-German expressions, and so one also hears the days of the week, namely Sonnta, Monta, Erta, Mitta etc.) pronounced in the Puster Valley, Vinschgau, and Ulten in the exact same way as among them.

The learned legal scholar of Pergine, Simon Peter Bartolomei, who greatly illuminated the histories of those regions, took the trouble in the year 1760 to compose a kind of comparative dictionary of those dialects, which still exists in manuscript. Although there is some difference among the words, such as is observed in every nation between village and village, and even between neighboring towns, nevertheless this dictionary also serves to convince us that all these mentioned Alpine inhabitants taken together were a perfectly uniform people, and their language deviated only little from the ancient dialect of the northern Tyrolean mountaineers.

This old form of their language, which partly from lack of culture and partly through the admixture of Italian has received a foreign addition, gives them the character of strangers; and since, intersected by newly arisen Italian communities and separated from the German Tyroleans, they could not keep pace with them in culture, they are now regarded by the very strangers who have settled among them as sons of another fatherland and colonies of distant provinces, while on the other hand these same German Tyroleans no longer recognize them as their old brethren. What an injustice against this Alpine people, if they were indeed the original inhabitants of those regions! They could answer him who regards them as strangers and inquires into their origin precisely what the Americans could answer the Spaniards. But of that more below!

(To be continued.)