L'ultima voce del dialetto

The village was called called Càrnere and stood at fourteen hundred metres above a slope exposed to the north, where the snow lingered until late May.

Filippo Greco arrived there arrived in September with a recorder digital, a notebook of transcriptions phonetic and the conviction quiet of someone who knows they are doing something important necessary.

Agnese Merlo was eighty-four years old and lived alone in the house where stone in which which she had been born. When Filippo knocked, she opened the door without asking who it was, as if she had been expecting him.

She spoke the dialect with Filippo from the very start, even though knowing that he understood only a word in three. That did not seem to bother her. On the contrary, it seemed that his partial not understanding her freed.

Filippo recorded everything, marking down in the notebook the phonemes that did not exist in any other other idiom living, the constructions syntactic that no grammar had ever codified.

One afternoon, Agnese stopped stopped in the middle of a sentence sentence and looked at the recorder. «Why does it want to keep, » she said, switching to Italian for the first time. «When I die I, it dies too also it. That is the its destiny. »

Filippo wanted to object, but Agnese raised a hand with a patience that left no room for arguments objections. «My son has learnt English. My granddaughter uses words I have never heard never heard. Languages languages are like the seasons. »

That evening Filippo listened back to the recordings with his earphones in the room he had had rented from the inn. The voice of Agnese did not sound like a relic. It sounded like someone who was talking because there was still a reason to.

He realised then that he had had misunderstood his own task. He was not there to save to save the dialect. He was there to bear witness to it while it was still alive.

He stayed in Càrnere for three weeks. Every morning Agnese him would make him coffee and resumed talking talking where she had left off the day before, as though if the night had not been an interruption.

The day on which which he left, she saw him off at the doorstep with a word from the dialect that he had not had ever heard before. He did not look it up look up in his glossary. Some words, he thought, do not have need of translation.