Bustocco and Legnanese (natively and ) are two dialects of

Western Lombard Western Lombard is a group of dialects of Lombard, a Romance language spoken in Italy. It is widespread in the Lombard provinces of Milan, Monza, Varese, Como, Lecco, Sondrio, a small part of Cremona (except Crema and its neighbours), Lo ...

, spoken respectively in the cities of

Busto Arsizio Busto Arsizio (; lmo, label= Bustocco, Büsti Grandi) is an Italian city and ''comune'' in the south-easternmost part of the Province of Varese, in the region of Lombardy, in Northern Italy, north of Milan. The economy of Busto Arsizio is main ...

( Province of Varese) and Legnano (

Province of Milan The Province of Milan ( it, Provincia di Milano) was a province in the Lombardy region, Italy. Its capital was the city of Milan. The area of the former province is highly urbanized, with more than 2,000 inhabitants/km2, the third highest populat ...

), Lombardy. Although there is little evidence of Ligurian settlements in the area, they are widely thought to have been characterised by the Ligurian substratum. While Legnanese is closer to the

Milanese dialect Milanese (endonym in traditional orthography , ') is the central variety of the Western dialect of the Lombard language spoken in Milan, the rest of its metropolitan city, and the northernmost part of the province of Pavia. Milanese, due to t ...

, Bustocco is especially considered very similar to the modern

Ligurian language Ligurian () or Genoese () (locally called or ) is a Gallo-Italic language spoken primarily in the territories of the former Republic of Genoa, now comprising the area of Liguria in Northern Italy, parts of the Mediterranean coastal zone of Fran ...

, for example for the frequent unstressed at the end of masculine nouns and other words is more frequent (e.g. Bustocco "cat", "dry", "hot", "glass", "when" = Legnanese , , , , ), as well as the elimination of some intervocalic consonants (e.g. Bustocco "to work" = Legnanese ). In both dialects stressed sounds like a mix between ''a'' and ''o''. A comic theatrical group called ''I Legnanesi'' uses Legnanese (with simplified grammar and lexicon heavily based on Italian) in its shows.

References

{{Languages of Italy Western Lombard language