Ferrarese dialect

The Ferrarese dialect (traditional orthography: dialèt frarés) refers to the dialect spoken by the native inhabitants of the city and environs of Ferrara, a city located in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.

Ferrarese, in addition to Emilia-Romagna, is also spoken in the area of Fertilia, in the Sassari province of Sardinia, because a sizable community from Ferrara established itself in the area following a Mussolini-sponsored development program during Fascist Italy.^[1]

The classification of this dialect remains an unsettled matter.  Historically, Ferrarese has been considered a member of the Gallo-Italic family of dialects, which compose the majority of dialects spoken in Emilia-Romagna.  The first proponent of this idea was Bernardino Biondelli, who included it in his 1853 work Saggio Sui Dialetti Gallo-Italici.

More recently however, this traditional categorization has come under increased scrutiny by scholars such as Romano Baiolini and Floriana Guidetti in their 2005 work Saggio Di Grammatica Comparata Del Dialetto Ferrarese. They and others claim that Ferrarese should instead be categorized as "Latin-Italic" due to phonological and historical/archeological considerations.  Specifically, they argue that the vowel system mirrors Imperial Latin more closely than surrounding dialects such as Bolognese do. Guidetti and Biaolini analyze vocalic quadrilaterals to highlight the differences present between the phonologies of Gallo-Italic and Ferrarese.^[2]

Additionally, Guidetti points out in her Q&A paper that Ferrarese differs from many Gallo-Italic dialects in that it has preserved the /a/ phoneme in first-conjugation Latin verbs such as andàr and cantàr, while other dialects such as Romagnol have diachronically shifted to mid-vowels andèr and cantèr.^[3]

Regarding the historical and archeological considerations, these scholars argue that Gallo-Italic dialects should be heavily influenced by ancient Gallic peoples (also referred to as Gauls), a group of Celtic, pre-Roman tribes which had settlements across Northern Italy before the eventual conquest of the region by the Romans.  Their claim is, therefore, that Ferrarese must not be a Gallo-Italic dialect because no significant archeological remains of settlement prior to Roman urbanization have been discovered in the once marshy and inhospitable area, and that the new Roman settlers in the region could thus not have been overly-influenced by Gallic linguistic observances.^[4]

Not all scholars are convinced by these ideas. In The Expression of Indefiniteness in Italo-Ferrarese Bilectal Speakers,^[5] doubt is cast on these claims (particularly in section 3.2 Origins, Classification, and Contacts).