Words that divide, words that unite. How the “ciargianese” has turned every town in the Marche into a small foreign state.
Do you speak ciargianese?
“But do you speak ciargianese?”
This question might seem like a joke, but it’s a small treatise on Marche sociolinguistics in five words.
A phrase used when you don’t understand someone, or when you speak a different dialect from the neighboring area.
But also – in a more subtle way – to highlight that you are out of place. A stranger. An outsider.
In reality, “ciargianese” is not even a language. It is a linguistic non-place, a middle ground between “I don’t understand you” and “you’re not one of us.”
It is the sound of misunderstanding elevated to an identity boundary.
And in a region like Marche, where the dialect changes every few turns, being ciargianese can mean coming from 5 km down the road.
But where does it really come from?
The word “giargianese” (with a G) is also found in Southern Italy and Lombardy, where it has been used to refer to foreigners or people perceived as “other.”
Over time, it has taken on even discriminatory nuances, but our Marchigian ciargianese is gentler: it is the local foreigner, the one who “isn’t from here” but resembles us.
It is the bartender in Tolentino who doesn’t understand the tourist from Porto Recanati.
It is the grandfather in Treia who listens to a thirty-year-old from Jesi say “è caldo MUNTOBE’” and comments: “What are you saying? Are you speaking ciargianese?”
What does it say about us?
The Ciargianese reveals how localistic we are, how much we count words, how at home we feel only when we are understood immediately.
At the same time, however, it is a small poetic tool to talk about the crisis of local languages, identity, nostalgia, the comic and the tragic in not understanding each other.
