Are questions about dialects on topic?

Question

Given a great variety of local dialects (and small languages) in Italy, should we allow questions about a specific way of saying things?
If a question appears about lu sicilianu (Sicilian language) or sardu (Sardinian language), how should we handle it? Should we answer as in the English cases (British English vs. American English)? Or should we limit the questions only to standard Italian?

For example, what should we do if a newbie appears, asking about something he/she has heard yesterday at the Catania fish market and truly believing it was Italian? So, he/she wouldn't ask for translation (which would be immediately off-topic) but rather for an explanation that couldn't be found in a dictionary. Do we wait until somebody from Catania comes to give an answer? Do we close such questions right away as off-topic? Do we explain first that it's another language? Do we suggest where to go in searches for an answer?

NB (after some discussions in the comments below): I do not advocate for answering the dialects questions. I'm just suggesting to define here a good practice regarding such questions.

Answer 1

I'm torn about this.

The difference between a dialect and a language is fuzzy and probably only dependent on its diffusion. Dialects have full-fledged grammars, vocabularies and history, making each one of them a language which is not Italian.

I'm a native Italian speaker and I can barely understand (and surely not able to speak) the dialect of my own city, Milano.

So I would lean towards considering questions about dialects as off-topic as they are not about the Italian language.

That being said, I think we should still be open to questions about dialectal terms and their relation with the Italian language.

For instance, there might be doubts about whether a term (and its usage) is dialectal-only or it's an actual Italian term. As an example, I have a few friends from Firenze, who use the expression

Questo telefono non fa

for indicating that a phone is not working, whereas the current Italian for it would be:

Questo telefono non funziona

and it turned out that using the verb fare, with the meaning of funzionare, was purely dialectal.

Questions about this kind of matters would be perfectly on-topic, IMHO.

Answer 2

I'm a foreigner living in Italy and I had to deal very often with local dialects/languages. It is a very fun and interesting thing, it is part of the Italian way and it shouldn't be excluded from this website. We can't afford to have a StackExchange website for every dialect of Italian (even if is Sicilian or Sardinian), so they all should be discussed here and tagged as "[dialect]" and make this tag a little more prominent (bigger or different color) and also include it in the question title. The tag will tell the speakers from other countries that they shouldn't be concerned about this questions if they want only to learn literal Italian (which was another dialect elevated to national status).

Answer 3

I am very ambivalent about this, on one hand you might be correct in assuming anything relating to Milanes or Sicilanu, is not Italian and should be off topic; on the other hand you have to admit that people from Milano and Sicily speak Italian differently, in what should be considered dialects of Italian.

Answer 4

What is normally called Italian dialect is not really a dialect of Italian, but rather a dialect of another language which is spoken in Italy. For example, I speak Bresciano, which is the main variety of the Eastern Lombard, which is not mutually intelligible with Italian. In fact, the Eastern Lombard word for wall is mür, which is closer to the French word than the Italian word; the masculine singular article in Eastern Lombard is el, which is closer to the Spanish article than the Italian one (il). I don't think that people who speak Italian would all understand i è nacc vià.

Questions about Eastern Lombard, Sicilian, Venetian, or Alpine Provençal are not really about Italian, and we should not assume that the users who speak Italian necessarily know one of those languages.

Answer 5

I'm obviously biased here because I have a couple of dialect questions I do not know where else to ask (save for Lingustics.SE), but I would say we should let those questions sit there for as long as needed. Why? Well, Chinese SE accepts dialect questions, and the variety there is just about as great as the one we have here: "Hakka" has a ton of subdialects, and I have found songs in at least three different subdialects. Also, phonetically speaking, dialects are wildly different from Mandarin, I'd say at least as much as Italian dialects differ from standard Italian, and I read that even grammatically some dialects have differences, just like it may be here (though I don't know of any grammatical difference from Italian to dialect that goes beyond different inflectional suffixes, save for an interesting use of impersonal forms in the dialect of my paternal grandparents, where one can say "L'è vnu la Paola", lit. "È venuto la Paola", where the lack of gender agreement makes me see an impersonal form in the verb). So I think dialect should not be considered as off-topic, but left open till someone knowledgeable chimes in, as happens on Chinese – and I know a thing or two about that, having asked plenty of Min and Hakka questions over there.

Answer 6

Italian dialects are a big and complicated mess. Instead of the few differences that there are between British English and American English, we would be dealing with radically different languages, with their own language, grammatical peculiarities (and sometimes rules), and of course dictionaries, and this clearly falls outside of the site scope.

Question that relate to dialects only tangentially, like a specific word that has been incorporated into Italian, or discussion about etimology or errors which might be more common in some regions, are perfectly within scope and on topic.

Answer 7

It would be cool to include the other languages and dialects from Italy, but I must agree with the others, they wouldn't really be on topic I'm afraid.

However if you have specific questions about linguistic aspects of them, you could ask on Linguistics SE. You won't be able to ask usage questions as you do on language sites, but some things can overlap if asked properly.

Answer 8

A suggestion: 1) allow questions about the dialects/languages; 2) change the description of the site in the tour to reflect that.

The rationale. The main and only reason to dis-allow questions about the co-languages that was ever pursued on this page is political correctness (there was little argumentation(*) for any other point, while there was extensive for this one, like below by I.M.). While the only reason to make decisions about the policies in the site is usefulness of the site. I think most people who speak some such language speak standard Italian, too. So, by targeting the scope more broadly you reach still the same audience. So, allowing such questions makes the site more useful. While changing the description in the tour solves the PC problem.

(*) Which was that there are too few experts to answer questions about the dialects. A futile point, and it was already answered, of course: there are some, that's enough. There's an even better answer: there would be no more experts on special Stacks Exchanges for all those languages, if such sites existed, than there would on this site. All those people who know something about such languages know something about Italian, too; so, if they would want to share their knowledge on Stack Exchanges, they already do so here. Actually, the little quantity of such experts speaks all for support of my suggestion, because they wouldn't sustain any separate Stack Exchanges for individual languages.

Answer 9

Tante risposte, ma mi sembra che nessuna abbia centrato il punto focale: questo sito si suppone debba essere frequentato da esperti, altrimenti la sua utilità sarebbe nulla (ai livelli di Yahoo Answers): quanti esperti di ciascun dialetto pensate di poter attirare? Sono pochissimi già dal vivo, figuriamoci quanti verrebbero qui abitualmente...

Per cui non è questione di accettare o meno i dialetti, bensì più pragmaticamente è questione che, anche volendo, non saremmo in grado di gestirli.