Dialect in the Neapolitan Linguistic Landscape between localism and globalization

Abstract

The contribution is situated within the interest in the ‘usability of dialect’ (Berruto 2012) in contemporary Italy, focusing on the study of dialect not as a spoken variety nor as an artistic or literary dialect, but as a (written) resource for constructing the linguistic landscape of urban space. On the basis of a large sample of photographs of the commercial signs of establishments active in the catering sector displayed in different neighbourhoods of the city of Naples, the aim is to classify the uses and functions of dialect in public writing in order to analyse the role and presence of Neapolitan in the linguistic construction of the city space. The study, conducted on the basis of a qualitative approach, presents a selection of writings exhibited entirely in dialect or multilingual using the tools of contact linguistics and in particular the model for analysing multilingual multimodal written texts developed by Mark Sebba (2012, 2013).