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The Italian contribution to the Hip Hop Nation was not achieved without struggle. Early attempts at rap were in English, and excruciating painful examples are found on Jovanotti's 1990 CD "Giovanni Jovanotti." UGH! Sergio Messina's "Gladio," a description of plans for a right-wing coup d'čtat funded by the C.I.A., is probably the only artistically successful rap in English by an Italian artist. In time, Italian artists conquered the rhythms of the big beat. And as they did, they rediscovered their own voice, ancient cadences of non-standard Italian.
The Land of Many Voices
Many Italian rappers reposition international Hip Hop by using Italian dialects in opposition to a national trend in flattening language distinctiveness. Italian rappers deliver their politicized rhymes in Genovese, Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Venetian in a conscious search for a popular voice rooted in place and the everyday lives of working people.
Non-standard Italian is a significant social phenomenon in Italy, where speakers from the north are unintelligible from those in south, and where up until recently the inhabitants of some neighboring mountain towns could not understand each other.
The term "dialect" of course is a political category not a linguistic one. These languages did not derive from Italian — the literary Florentine written by Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch in the 14th century, and codified two centuries later. Like Tuscan, Italian dialects were vernacular languages derived from Latin, not Italian. The "dialects" were not confined to the illiterate masses but were used in written forms from the Norman court in Sicliy to Venetian operas.
It was in the 15th and 16th centuries that local dialects took on negative connotations in relationship to centralized seats of political power. The devaluing of non-standard Italian, especially southern dialects, intensified after the unification of the country in 1861.
After World War II, Italians became increasingly fluent in the national language with the introduction of television, higher education, migration, and increased leisure travel. Popular music played an important part in the tranmission of standard Italian, from the musical pap presented at the annual San Remo festival to the cantautori's (singer songwriters) protest music during the 1960s and 1970s. After the 1960s, Italian-sung popular music increased with the diminishing role of Naples, with its rich song tradition, as a major producer of popular mass culture.
Despite the increased use of Italian, less than half (44.6 percent) the population speaks Italian only or predominately at home according to a 1997 survey conducted by the Istituto Centrale di Statistica. Less than 20 percent speaks Italian in the southern regions of Calabria, Campania, and Sicily. Italy remains a bilingual country, with people speaking Italian and their familiar local dialect.
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