La parlèsia: un’indagine sociolinguistica sul gergo dei musicisti napoletani

Abstract

Spoken in the nineteenth century by the posteggiatori, the wandering minstrels of Naples, parlèsia is a jargon. It shares its syntax and its phonology with the Neapolitan dialect and is characterized by a special lexicon of about 200 words, referring above all to money, women, and music. Parlèsia has been a secret code until the 1950s when Neapolitan pop artists used expressions of the jargon in their music. The results of a sociolinguistic investigation conducted among 150 musicians in Naples demonstrate that parlèsia is still being understood and spoken although today it seems more like a form of youth slang than a code of a marginalised group of speakers.