La lingua parlata del Galateo

It is rather reckless to exhaustively define the languages which were actually spoken by southern Italian humanists during the Italian Renaissance. This is especially evident because of the persistent diamesic differences and the widely diglossical conditions through the centuries. Furthermore, a difficult reconstruction is pointed out by various authoritative sources (Palermo 2004, Coluccia 2010) due to philological considerations. The attempt may result even riskier when dealing with those pronunciation features which are generally blurred by the writing system of such languages. Nevertheless, keeping in mind the present day linguistic situation of the Sallentinian towns where Galateo did live, this paper aims at broadly summarising some considerations about local characteristics widespread within texts in vulgar attested in Galateo's works with respect of the expected evolutionary conditions of such languages since the XVth c. (Bausi 2004, Iurilli 2010, Maggiore 2016). Even though variation may be accounted for in reference to stylistic or textual reasons (see Parlangeli 1956), phonetic realisations that we may imagine, thanks to explicit conditions witnessed by some authors, are mostly inferred (cp. Sabatini 1993, 1996, Coluccia 2010). On the basis of a selection of examples taken from the Esposizione del Pater Noster, I propose to assess more reliable occurrences which may be studied according to nowadays conditions. By providing phonetic-dialectological references, I look forward to helping those specialists who are working to a detailed description of the linguistic framework in which these texts were written.