Vitalità, vulnerabilità e strategie di rivitalizzazione dei dialetti in Campania

In 2019 the Campania Region promulgated a law on protection and enhancement of dialects. The preparation and content of the law is first discussed in this paper, together with a reflection on the vitality of the Campanian dialects and on the effectiveness of literacy as a tool for revitalization. Subsequently, some observations are made on the graphic traditions and discontinuities within the history of the Neapolitan script. Current dialectal scripts are finally taken into consideration: they sometimes show attachment to the nineteenth-century tradition, sometimes a total detachment from it. The “neo-dialectal” scripts, which fit well in the new media, differentiate themselves from regional Italian by freely using the tools made available by literacy. Some writers on the other hand request a more standardized orthography in order to claim the prestige of the dialect. Without falling into ideological drifts, and by not assuming a normative perspective, language policies in Campania should favor linguistic pluralism, thus stimulating processes of multilingual acquisition that include, among others, the local dialects.