Is Italian A Musical Language?

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One of the most common linguistic misconceptions regards the music of languages. Italian is particularly prone to falling victim to such a fallacy.

All languages are musical. Italian is not more musical than German, or Chinese, or English. It's just a different kind of tune.

It might perhaps be more appropriate to talk about euphony, i.e. the quality of good sound (keep in mind that "good sound" falls into the category of subjective opinions). A voiceless glottal fricative (where an "H" kind of aspiration grates the back of your mouth the way a bread knife slices through a loaf of stale bread) is just a regular sound in languages like Dutch, German, or Arabic. However, Italians use it to mimic the sound of someone throwing up whenever expressing disgust.

One might feel attracted to such sounds, but he can hardly contend that a voiceless glottal fricative is a gracious and gentle sound. Therefore, we might define euphony for the purpose of this article as a complex of gracious and gentle language sounds.

The importance of vowel sounds in Italian represents the main reason everybody refers to it as a musical language. Despite the presence of vowel sound reduction in Italian (as in all languages), the latter is not as marked out as in English for example. In fact, drawing out vowel sounds is one of the most characteristic features of Italian phonetics.

Problems arise when learners confuse vowel sound lengthening with pitch roller coasters. In my experience working with actors who need to deliver lines in Italian, dismay always ensues when I explain they should sound plain when saying their lines. The secret of the music of Italian does not lie in pitch changes (unless one is deliberately trying to sound regional and put on a southern drawl, or parody some whiny Bolognese sentence ending) but in giving vowel sounds their due importance.

A few years ago I was contacted by a particularly famous actress who needed to learn a few lines in Italian. As far as I could gather, she was playing the role of a noble English woman who at some point in the film had an exchange in Italian with members of Italian royalty. After a brief breakdown of Italian phonetics (mainly vowels), I asked her to read the script without any particular directions from me and simply relying on intuition. I wanted to see what I was working with. When she was done, I asked her facetiously if she had just landed a role in The Godfather Part IV. It was perhaps tactless of me, but she was humble and got the point. We worked on her lines, and after two hours she sounded obviously foreign but perfectly believable as someone who can speak some good Italian with eloquence and a marked elegance in delivery.

Standard Italian is spoken plainly, and if you will, in a relatively monotone way. Pitch variations occur in questions and emphatic sentences for the most, but they certainly won't cause you to sound Sicilian, or Neapolitan, or Pugliese, etc. (southern Italian variations contain more tonal ups and downs than northern Italian variations, so pitch laddering will automatically yield a southern flair).

Therefore, if you're studying Italian, just sound normal.

Listen to American movies dubbed in Italian (which all students of Italian seem to abhor) for standard Italian speech. Pick an actor or actress you like and pretend you're him or her when speaking Italian. Repeat their lines exactly as they say them. Replicate their intonation and patterns, and focus instead on linking together the ending sound of a word with the initial sound of the following word. Monologues and interviews to one actor are especially useful.

Following is an incomplete list of classic and more recent actors who speak some great Italian:

Male:

1) Vittorio Gassman

2) Marcello Mastroianni

3) Ugo Tognazzi

4) Alberto Lupo

5) Giancarlo Giannini

6) Ferruccio Amendola (dubber)

7) Giuseppe Rinaldi (dubber)

8) Pino Locchi (dubber)

Female:

1) Anna Magnani

2) Gina Lollobrigida

3) Emanuela Rossi (dubber)

4) Simona Izzo (dubber)

5) Margherita Buy

6) Domitilla D'Amico (dubber)

7) Maria Pia Di Meo (dubber)

8) Lilli Gruber (news anchor)

Ultimately, if there were a single one rule about the kind of Italian you should learn, that would be the following: learn and speak the kind of Italian you like best, whether you're going to sound Sicilian or Venetian. Just be fully aware of what you're doing.

On second thought, be only half aware, or it's not fun.

So there's that.