Is not being able to speak a right? Reread Tullio De Mauro to understand how Italy has developed

“They’re beasts, they can’t even speak – can’t you see they can’t speak?” – And she: “We must be patient with them; they may be beasts, but they’re also Christians.” Even today, there are many “Christians” who cannot speak. They are not just Muslims. And the protagonist of Moravia’s story, set in Rome in the 1950s – the title was "Non sanno parlare" – eventually begins to come to terms with it. “You have to be patient.” Even the government has come to terms with it. In the infamous decree which, according to Schlein, establishes apartheid (“a concentration of racism and ignorance”), there is no provision for removing children from parents who are unable, or unwilling, to learn Italian. There is a fine of between 200 and 1,000 euros; in Italy, this means the rule is effectively unenforceable from the outset. Yet, if they ‘can’t speak’, their integration and that of their children will be more difficult – even Giovacchino, the protagonist of Moravia’s novel, had managed to grasp this. Learning the language of the country in which one lives is not only a sacrosanct right, but also a duty. The ‘Land of Opportunity’ begins here, as our early immigrants knew – they at least learnt to say ‘boss’ for ‘capo’ and ‘rifle’ for ‘fucile’.

That the government’s not exactly well-conceived Education Decree was primarily propaganda aimed at the right – just as the left’s indignation was merely instrumental propaganda – has already been stated and is clear even to non-Italian speakers. Yet yesterday, La Repubblica carried headlines devoid of factual basis: ‘Parents who do not speak Italian in the firing line’, ‘Children taken away from those who refuse’. This is not true; it is the bipartisan face of populism. Outside the realm of politics, however, there is a cultural absurdity – a denial of our country’s very linguistic memory and of how it was painstakingly built – which is astonishing coming from left-wing politicians and others besides.

The decree does not provide for the removal of children from parents who do not facilitate the use of the Italian language at home – and the Constitutional Court would certainly reject such a provision. But there is not even a ‘right’ in the Constitution to ignore Italian, even setting aside the fact that in Germany, knowledge of the German language is a mandatory requirement for obtaining citizenship. One might argue that this is a task that should be funded by public money, and that is true. But to pass off not knowing Italian as a right is worse than being reactionary; it is simply stupid.

It is astonishing that this should come from the progressive camp: it means they no longer even read Moravia. Or that they are unaware of our country’s linguistic history. That they no longer even read Tullio De Mauro, the great historian of the Italian language, an intellectual of the progressive left, and Minister of Education under Amato. He was the first to explain and clarify the civic – even before the sociological or political – mechanism by which one ‘becomes’ Italian. One emerges from the minority status in which millions of post-war Italians found themselves, and not just in the south. It was also television, yes, after the 1960s (so much for Pasolini’s ‘fireflies’), that ensured all Italians began to speak the language of a united Italy in a way that had not happened for the previous ninety years. They began to speak Italian, at least at a basic level, encouraging their children to use the new language as well. School combined with television, but also a desire for social integration to which all post-war generations can bear witness. De Mauro pointed out that, until 1974, more than half of Italians used only their dialect at home. It was not until the 1980s (was it Berlusconi’s fault?) that Italian became the permanent language in homes as well. In the major cities of the north, it was immigration that led to the dialects dying out first. In Rome, the language had already changed by the sixteenth century, when immigration from Florence and central Italy forced the Romans – who were still speaking like Cola di Rienzo – to change their language altogether. Who knows why they accepted it: could it have been fascism? Do they still read Tullio De Mauro there?

Even The Economist reported on it during the Expo, in an article that recalled with nostalgia and amazement the now-extinct Milanese dialect of Svampa, Jannacci and Strehler – witnesses to a turning point in history that also represented integration. It was not a cataclysm that brought about the change: it was the need for the Milanese (or Turinese) themselves to begin – and gradually succeed – in communicating with the newcomers. But the opposite also happened: dialects and everyday languages began to incorporate words from other sources, or from modernity. It was also a matter of respect and hospitality, of starting to speak the language ‘of everyone’. Consequently, people also ceased speaking dialect at home: Lombard parents, no less than those from the hills around Piacenza, stopped using dialect at the dinner table—precisely to ‘force’ their children to learn Italian, the language of school, the language of everyone. One need only ask an elderly person for confirmation.

Even Concetto Vecchio, however, is stretching the point: “Anyone who emigrated to Switzerland in the 1960s and 1970s knows that only a few parents actually spoke Schweizerdeutsch or German: they would turn up for parent-teacher meetings accompanied by their perfectly bilingual children, and it was the children who acted as interpreters with the teachers and lecturers”. Were they ‘entitled’ to do so? Was it not, rather, a hindrance to their own freedom and integration? Can a left-wing movement – or, to put it more broadly, a conscious and progressive society – really trade cultural and civil progress for an absurd linguistic niqab, just to spite Giorgia Meloni? It is political illiteracy.