Vastese (Vastese: or , meaning "the dialect of Vasto") is a

Romance language The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European languages, I ...

spoken in the town of

Vasto Vasto ( Abruzzese: '; grc, Ἱστόνιον, Histonion}, la, Histonium) is a ''comune'' on the Adriatic coast of the Province of Chieti, in southern Abruzzo, Italy. During the Middle Ages it was called d''Guastaymonis'', '' Vasto d'Aimone'' or ...

. of it and Italian. It is not spoken by any other town, even the nearby town of

Cupello Cupello ( Abruzzese: ') is a ''comune'' and town in the province of Chieti in the Abruzzo region of Italy Twin towns * Ladispoli, Italy * Benicarló Benicarló () is a city and municipality in the north of the province of Castelló, part of t ...

, which is only away.

History

Vastese's

endonym An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...

— the name its speakers use for the language — is . This term is known to have originated in the sixth century AD.

Demography

Today Vastese is spoken monolingually only by residents of

in their 80s and 90s,

bilingual Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...

ly by many residents in their 70s, and many middle-aged residents are passive speakers, while most younger residents have no comprehension. The Vasto Club in

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

is a club organized for migrants to Australia from

Phonology

Vastese has more vowel distinctions than Tuscan, Italy's official and standard language. It has vowels that are not in Italian, such as the

open front unrounded vowel The open front unrounded vowel, or low front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. It is one of the eight primary cardinal vowels, not directly intended to correspond to a vowel sound of a specific language bu ...

. Vastese uses an

open back rounded vowel The open back rounded vowel, or low back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . It is called "turned script ''a''", being a rotated ...

for the start of the word . It also uses the

mid central vowel The mid central vowel (also known as schwa) is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a ə, rotated lowercase letter e. While the ''Handbook of th ...

. Vastese also uses several diphthongs not used in italian such as , , and . The influence of , , , or upon , turns it into either or .

History

Demography

Phonology

References

See also