Milanese dialect
Milanese 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 the importance of Milan, the largest city in Lombardy, is often considered one of the most prestigious Lombard variants and the most prestigious one in the Western Lombard area.
In Italian-language contexts, Milanese is often called a dialetto. This can be misunderstood to mean a variety of the Tuscan-derived national language, which it is not. Lombard in general, including Milanese, is a sister language of Tuscan, thus also of Italian, rather than a derivative. Typologically, Lombard is a Western Romance language, and more closely resembles other Gallo-Italic languages in northern Italy as well as others further afield, including Occitan and Romansh.
Distribution
The Milanese dialect as commonly defined today is essentially concentrated around Milan and its metropolitan city, reaching into the northernmost part of the province of Pavia. Subdialects of Milanese - also known as dialètt arios - are spoken in the western part of the province, the eastern part, the parts to the north of the Naviglio Martesana, certain areas where the dialect becomes transitional, the southern parts, and the northern parts of the province of Pavia.Historically, up to the late 19th century, "Milanese" was also used to define the dialects spoken in Brianza and in the areas of Varese and Lecco ; less commonly it was also used to cover the whole Western Lombard dialect area, which had in Milanese its most prestigious variety.
Orthography
As Milanese, like the Lombard language as a whole, is not an officially recognized language anywhere, there have been many different orthographic conventions, including pan-Lombard proposals, and conventions limited to Western Lombard. The de facto standard for Milanese, though, is the literary classical Milanese orthography.Classical Milanese orthography is the oldest orthographic convention still in use and it is the one used by all writers of Milanese literature, most famously by Carlo Porta. The trigraph , used to represent the phoneme, is considered the most distinctive feature of this standard. Since the latter half of the 20th century, as a consequence of the Italianization of Lombardy with the Lombard language ceasing to be the main language of daily use in Milan, the Classical orthography has been contested and lost ground as Italian speakers often find it counterintuitive. Classical Milanese orthography, which often reflects etymology, has indeed many words closely resembling their Italian cognates, but pronunciation is often different, one of the most striking examples being orthographic doubled consonants which represent geminates in Italian but a short preceding vowel in Milanese: compare Italian and with its Milanese cognates and .