Nomi di frutti e di piante nel dialetto di Nemi, tra conservazione e innovazione

Items of food lexicon, particularly relevant to fruit names, observed in the dialect spoken in Nemi, in the Castelli Romani area, are characterized by survival of the neutral gender. Materials, collected through dialectal inquiries, are analyzed from both etymological and morphological points of view and grouped according to their plural endings: -a, -ora, -i, and -e. A marked vitality is shown by the class of nouns with –a ending in the plural, such as u melu / e mela (eng. 'the apple, the apples'). This morpheme is also found in other sectors of the lexicon and in toponymy. An insight is also given regarding the sociolinguistic use of those forms, that reveals the variable vitality of the dialect among people of different age ranges. This specific type of morphological analysis applied to a specific set of lexical items confirms the picture of extraordinary variety of the Median dialects of Italy, which the dialect of Nemi including those of the Castelli Romani area, belongs to.