Hearing people speak on television and radio programs, or in films from the fifties or sixties, it is easy to notice a difference compared to the way of speaking Italian that we are used to today. It is not just a difference in vocabulary – that is, in the choice of words – which has naturally changed over the decades. There is indeed a difference in intonation and cadence, which perhaps not all of us would be able to describe but which is evident and recognizable enough to become the subject of imitations and parodies.
It is a way of speaking that sounds a bit artificial to our ears, as well as affected, and which today is no longer heard anywhere: neither on television or on the radio, nor in other more or less institutional contexts, nor even spoken by people who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. There is a reason, which is linked to the history of the diffusion and evolution of Italian and the means of mass communication: what is certain however is that in those years no one really spoke like that.
«The television and radio clips are the traces we have of how we spoke in the Sixties, but television is something different from spontaneous speech», explains Stefania Spina, who teaches linguistics at the University for Foreigners of Perugia. «So much so that if we look at documentaries instead, whose explicit desire was to tell the reality, we notice the difference between the speaker who speaks like this and the people interviewed who speak in dialect».
In fact, until the end of the 1960s, Italian was a widely written but very little spoken language: the percentage of illiterates in the population was still very high and in everyday life people spoke everywhere in dialect. At the same time, however, radio, which arrived in 1924, and then television, in 1954, were state broadcasters which, in addition to the purpose of informing and entertaining the entire population, also had an educational mission. Therefore, in those years the need to have an institutional national language arose.
“There was no standard oral Italian spoken normally and we had to find it,” explains Marco Biffi, professor of Italian linguistics at the University of Florence. «The Florentine was the closest to this model but it still had regional traits, and to compensate for them the Roman pronunciation was used: the so-called amended Florentine came out», explains Biffi, «but it is an abstract pronunciation that can be learned with a course of diction”.
Those who worked in radio and television took diction courses to remove regional inflections and adopt this standard pronunciation, which was up to par with national broadcasters. At the end of the 1960s it became mandatory for RAI journalists to follow the pronunciation indicated in Dop. Spelling and pronunciation dictionary of the Italian language. In addition to the professionals trained in this way, there were few ordinary people who spoke on television, and those few were still selected based on their ability to get as close as possible to that standard Italian. Biffi explains that if that way of speaking seems so artificial to us today “it is precisely because it was a language spoken in an unnatural way, because it was learned after the mother tongue”.
«This formal attention to the language was reverberated in the intonation», continues Biffi. «There was this idea of Italian as an untouchable system, and coming from the literary language there was little spontaneity and familiarity in using it», adds Vera Gheno, sociolinguist and among other things author of the Post podcast Loving words. In Spina’s words, “it was a fake way of speaking, a model to refer to even for pronunciation and tone, very sober and very set.” He was an Italian who didn’t exist outside of TV anyway, either in cultured conversations.
Towards the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, with the economic boom and the spread of television in many homes and clubs, things changed. On the one hand, illiteracy decreased and spoken Italian spread much more. On the other hand, private commercial televisions established themselves, i.e. those which, unlike Rai, were financed by advertising and did not have such a strong institutional and educational imprint: ordinary people also began to appear on television, with professions other than that of journalist .
In the 1980s, Italian was effectively everyone’s language, and consequently also became the language of television, which no longer had any reason to refer to a standard model so far from spoken language. Furthermore, private local television stations began to become national and this accustomed viewers to regional accents different from their own. «At that point the TVs no longer taught Italian, but reflected the language that was spoken», summarizes Biffi.
Gheno points out that things have evolved in this direction more and more in the following years: “today on television we hear people who make mistakes in diction, local dialects, but also pronunciation defects, and it is not considered unbecoming.” In more recent years, a more general tendency to want to show authentic, more improvised and less constructed scenes on television, following the tastes of new generations of spectators, and a general less attention to formality has further contributed. In a recent opinion article, the journalist Michele Serra criticized the television speech that has established itself in recent years, defining it as “Italian-esque: no longer Romanesque (or Venetian, Sicilian, Ligurian…) but very distant from Italian”, understood, in its case, like Italian correct for diction and inflection.
