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Photo by Tyler Anderson / National Post

Ciociaro is so distinct that someone who speaks only formal Italian can barely understand it, save for a few common words here and there. Iannozzi’s sister, he said, spent months overseas learning Italian, hoping she could communicate with her grandmother, who speaks the dialect.

“Grandma had no idea what she was taking about,” he said. “My grandma was like, where did you send her?”

The dialect is likely headed for extinction in Italy, too. Since the 1950s, television and an improved national education system have infused formal Italian into the rural villages of Ciociaria. The young people there rarely speak the dialect anymore.

Photo by Tyler Anderson / National Post

The encroachment of formal Italian has led to a splintering of the dialect — so there’s not a single version of Ciociaro. Instead, the dialect changes slightly from town to town, depending on the level of exposure to formal Italian, according to Gianni Blasi, a retired Italian linguistics professor from Ciociaria. Towns in the valleys, where the main roads run through, have seen much more outside influence then the towns secluded on hilltops, he said.

“When you move from town to town,” Blasi said, “you realize something’s changing, something’s going on.

“It’s a heritage, which is slowly, slowly, slowly being watered down. And in a few years it will start evaporating. It’s a slow but irreversible process.”

Photo by Tyler Anderson / National Post

For Iannozzi, it all means that the version of the dialect he’s studying in Sarnia could be better preserved than it is in Italy, since it hasn’t been constantly bombarded by formal Italian. It’s as if the dialect is frozen, he said.